From collecting little chunks of digital information to having access to big data, information today has definitely evolved into becoming a strategic asset for organizations. The next challenge for businesses is to establish a balance between attaining the right quality of data and utilizing it in the best possible way. As important as it is to collect information, it is imperative to ensure its quality to be able to use it for important business decisions. Moreover, it is also vital to have protection/storage strategies prepared to keep data from all types of information security threats and possible misuse.
Foolproof Data Management Strategy and The Role of Training
In short, organizations are dealing with massive growth in data and therefore require a foolproof data management plan to take care of it. To help your data management team understand and implement the best practices for data management, NetApp training and certification such as Data Protection Administration and ONTAP cluster administration, can be your best bet. The theory and practical implication associated with NetApp training and certification can prepare your management experts to not only collect useful and high-quality data but also secure the important enterprise data to avoid the potential of the threat.
With training, your data is protected from getting lost or stolen. Information management can be tough and improving your skills as a part of your team can help you save a lot that could go wrong. The cost of litigation can be massive, especially if the data management team lacks the skills and resources required to keep it up to date. The cost does not only impact your organization's wallet but also in terms of credibility. Ensuring best data management practices with NetApp training is the best defense and foolproof strategy in establishing a strong management program. The five major keys of data management best practices as discussed below:
Security
Surrounded with a variety of data every day, it becomes imperative that a proper plan is in place. Incidences like ransomware attacks, hacking, data leak are more common than you think and thus, it makes it even more important to have a strong data security plan adjusted in your management program.
All in all, security should be taken very seriously and be treated as a priority. Here's what you can do:
- Be particularly vigilant about confidential and sensitive data. Make sure it is locked in passwords or lock and key.
- Keep records that need to be accessed more frequently available at all times.
- Control access rights and assign authorities to specific data based on their requirement and usage.
- Go digital with the kind of data that's most vulnerable and safeguard.
- Outsource to a data protection and storage partner who can offer you maximum security.
Scheduling
The team is responsible for keeping every record of retention-destruction on schedule. In addition to collecting new data every day, your organization is also creating new material constantly. The willingness to keep every detail means you will surely be inundated by the massive amounts of records and plenty of papers. Naturally, it could make data management more difficult to handle, index, store, or sort. If you are working in a cloud environment, keeping every record and data file can also eat up your available storage space. As a result, you lose money on both storage and real estate. Therefore, it is important to place a retention schedule for all the recorded information to track its lifetime and ensure it is destroyed in a responsible and timely manner. Not only it saves you a lot of storage space, but it also ensures that your information does not end up in the wrong hands.
Hierarchical Storage
Setting up a hierarchy based on the value of the records can help with data management more efficiently. Training helps the team determine this hierarchy based on their informed judgments. This could save time, space, and money. Some records must be accessed more frequently, but others become obsolete after some time. Similarly, some documents are more sensitive than others and require a higher level of protection whereas others, not so much.
Not all records and information is equal and thus, should be treated accordingly. Imposing a uniform policy for all the records can cause waste of resources as well as weaker security. Placing a default setting for high security for information that doesn't require it can be costly. Therefore, data management best practices suggest cutting down that cost and segregate records on the basis of important and vulnerability and dedicate tiered information storage and management system accordingly. This does not only help with smarter allocation of resources but also enables the team to provide better security to high-value, sensitive documents.
Auditing
Audits and indexes are your pals when it comes to data management. While dealing with the bulk of information collected and stored in your system, finding a specific piece of data is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The best way to avoid such a problem is to create an index with metadata or basic parameters that categorizes the index based on importance, department, and type. This is the most effective way to locate a document between millions of similar looking documents without wasting any resources or time. The indexing process can be further simplified by implementing a digital format for imaging and scanning processes.
Consider Offsite Storage
Last but not least, it is a great idea to consider offsite storage options - such as hybrid cloud - that also comes with a disaster recovery plan. This guarantees better security as well as continuity in case of a data breach or cyber threat incident. Additionally, cloud storage is also an excellent platform to restrict external access - including individuals from the organization who are not authorized to access the data as a security measure. Disaster recovery and archives measures should be in place beforehand.
The key is to provide your data management team with the best NetApp training to ensure establishing an efficient and secure program for making the most out of available data. Get in touch with one of our NetApp experts today.