‘Mid-sized firms should leverage enterprise tech’

RAYMOND Goh, the author, is Symantec’s regional technical director for systems engineering and customer advisory services, Asia south region. He has more than 18 years experience in the IT industry and is responsible for strategic engagements with organizations in the region on their security, storage and systems management requirements.

LARGE enterprises are not the only ones looking into advanced technologies. Mid-sized businesses are increasingly looking into leveraging enterprise technologies that help them meet the challenges of managing their information daily. As their business grows, midsized businesses will have a jump start on their enterprise IT plan by considering these solutions early.

Today, tools like deduplication, archiving and virtualization are being packaged in ways that put them within reach of midsized business. The following are some key technologies that midsized companies could consider to increase efficiency, save money and maximize IT resources.

Deduplication

Deduplication is one of the most effective technologies mid-sized businesses can deploy to address both rapid data growth and tight budgets. By eliminating redundant data across multiple backups or systems to reduce the amount of data stored,deduplication can reduce the amount of backup data stored by up to 90 percent or more.

As a result, businesses can dramatically reduce backup storage costs by consolidating and reusing existing storage resources.


Archiving

Many IT administrators in mid-sized organizations would agree that keeping old, infrequently accessed and redundant data on expensive servers is a waste of space. It is also a costly and time-consuming challenge to manage, maintain and back up the data. Symantec has found that it is 1,500 times more expensive to review an expired document than to store it. Businesses that are reviewing expired documents are wasting precious hours they could have saved – if only they had a proper archiving system in place. Archiving takes infrequently used information off of primary storage, indexes it and moves it into less expensive disks for longer-term retention.


Endpoint Virtualization

Today, many mid-sized businesses are finding that important information is scattered across their desktops, laptops, PDAs, and servers. Endpoint virtualization can separate information that matters from the rest of the IT environment, so that it can be better protected, managed and secured.

As the use of mobile devices has been increasingly popular in midsized businesses, it is more important than ever to protect and manage endpoints, whether physical, virtual or hybrid. The point of virtualization is to make the end user more productive and secure, regardless of what device they are using.


Looking Ahead

With the rising IT storage costs, delivering an effective strategy to organizations looking to address the challenges of managing their information is critical for businesses today. Midsized businesses should not be afraid to look at advanced technologies in their IT planning that will enable them to manage their information more effectively.

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 21, 2011.