All businesses rely on data, but perhaps none as directly as those in retail. Every sale, return, or item sitting in inventory generates data that is important to a retailer’s success, and that data is only useful if it is able to be accessed, interpreted, and applied to specific company objectives. It is for this reason that having a strategy for data storage is so important. Here is some data storage basics retailers should consider in order to maximize productivity and profitability.
Data Complexity
For retailers, data storage presents a number of unique challenges. IT departments in retail are typically overworked, and it is essential to regularly backup high volumes of data that are critical to the business such as inventory reports, sales forecasts, packaging designs, marketing videos, and legal documents. This complex data must then be secured in order to reduce the risk of hackers tapping in and threatening clients, suppliers, and personnel.
There is also the issue of how and where to store your records. Since most retail businesses value space within their retail locations, it is essential that data can be stored offsite yet still remain highly accessible from anywhere, anytime, on any device.
Scalability of Data Storage
For a number of retail organizations, developing a scalable data storage strategy is a best practice. Automated data backup and migration helps to save on resources and allows the business to grow with minimal impact on the company’s resources. Data protocols and pre-defined policies make it easy for the data to become available whenever it is needed, but only by the right people within the organization.
The cloud offers the optimal benefits of constant availability and limitless storage for data being created in both physical locations and via the web. It’s highly scalable in terms of storage and pricing, making it one of the easiest solutions for scalable data storage.
Data Storage Management
Proper management of data storage through the use of an intelligent file archiving solution, for example, provides retail businesses with the ability to save money on hardware and software infrastructure while still achieving top-notch data security and monitoring. The data is automatically backed up, providing protection from outages or theft, and can be recovered efficiently.
Perhaps most important of all, this immediate access to data means that it can be optimized, analyzed, and acted upon quickly and with ease. Management is then able to identify trends and shift strategies instantly in order to communicate with various members of their operation and provide a more personalized experience to customers to improve customer loyalty and incremental spending.
The Bottom Line
Whether you are a small retail operation looking to improve the efficiency of your onsite data storage system, a medium-sized organization that wants to have both on-premise and cloud-based storage with room for expansion, or are simply looking to migrate your retail operation to more flexible data storage in the cloud, ShareArchiver is able to help. Our data storage management solutions provide the opportunity for you to enhance data analytics while still providing secure, fast access to data, improving productivity, and lowering costs.
