Your company likely relies on data and has invested tremendous resources gathering as much of it as possible. This information is invaluable to your business, as its analysis gives you the ability to identify trends and patterns to react quickly to changing demands and conditions. Your business intelligence gives you what you need to compete effectively in the marketplace, but it does so at a cost.
Data storage costs often include hardware, software, and the cost of technical support. They also tend to include less obvious costs, such as slow server performance due to poorly structured data and high monthly storage costs from too much unused or old data.
If you want to combat these issues, you need to invest in a data management strategy that compresses your data volumes, offering both higher efficiency and lower costs.
Trends in Increasing Efficiency
You need to be able to quickly access your company data whenever you need it. Slow systems create big problems, as witnessed by a recent report from the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) that found high data volumes are slowing down decision-making.
Among other things, their study also showed that among companies surveyed:
- 72% had at least one strategic initiative fail in the last three years due to delayed decision making
- 42% reported a lost competitive advantage to competitors who were able to respond more efficiently
This is found across most industries. Luckily, data compression can provide you with the ability to maintain and manage all of your data with no loss of information or downtime, while boosting your network’s ability to access it more quickly. This is because decreasing your average file size improves your ability to transfer information much faster across your organization.
Driving Need for Lower Costs
As your organization continues to collect data, your overall storage costs will continue to rise – especially as regulations and e-discovery needs impose additional requirements for how long it needs to be retained. The cost savings generated through an efficient data volume compression strategy are simple to understand – the more your files are compressed, the more files you can store in your available storage space.
This significant reduction to your database storage allows you to eliminate the need to buy additional hardware, so you can allocate any additional resources to data maintenance and support, thus lowering costs and improving overall productivity.
Finding the Right Data Compression Solution
Your need for increased efficiency and reduced data storage and management costs is a given, but you also need a data storage optimization system that fits your organizational goals and systems. Essentially, you need a data archiving system that provides you with the opportunity to optimize your data storage based on your needs, providing you with analytical tools that collect data usage information so that you can structure your own data compression policies.
This type of solution should enable you to look at your own data and determine how your data storage should be tiered and compressed automatically. A system like this allows you to have a better understanding of your own data usage, while at the same time allowing you to operate at a higher performance level with reduced storage costs.
ShareArchiver is one of these tools. Unlike other file archiving solutions, we combine data compression and replication to drastically improve your data management and access while significantly lowering costs. Call us today to learn more or try our solution free.