The advent of e-business and other major business waves has exposed the fact that data storage is not managed to the benefit of the business processes, but rather has been dictated by applications and operating platforms. Large companies are finding their e-business initiatives embattled, and one of the reasons lies in inefficient or impossible data exchange between back-end and customer-facing systems. By understanding and mapping the data availability needs of the business to the overall e-business strategy, organisations can go a long way to overcoming the data storage problems associated with e-enabling themselves and their customers.
Phil Coombs of Datacentrix company , believes that an enterprise-centric storage management architecture could go a long way to solving the problems of data availability, systems integration and even backup and disaster recovery. Supported Software`s network storage integration division provides an end-to-end consulting, design and implementation service for large organisations with large data storage, transfer and management requirements.
Coombs says that most organisations have, by default, hybrid storage requirements, depending on the types of transactions and data their systems generate. "The relatively low cost of data storage media meant that data storage has been allowed to grow in line with operating systems and applications, without much consideration for current and future business needs."
Offering multiple electronic services to different customers has also created a greater range of selling and delivery methods. To compound this development, all such services are now being offered through a single portal, "To make the most of e-business opportunities companies must be able to offer all their services to all their clients through a common access method."
Multiple business partners are interfacing with the enterprise through a single portal. These business partners want access to all the facilities within this enterprise. However, at the back-end, these facilities are located on disparate applications running on multiple platforms. Likewise, the data supporting these applications is not directly and simply addressable.
"The first step is to establish business rules that will be applied across the organisation. These rules are then embedded in the data access and management facilities that already exist in the organisation. The final step is to relocate the data in such a way that data is made more readily accessible to the organisation. This is done according to a storage plan which takes the entire enterprise needs into account."
Storage, therefore, is business-driven and not technology-driven, says Coombs. "A company may find that it is already a lot closer to an optimal data storage solution with its existing technology - all it needs is repositioning and rearranging to bring it into compliance with the company`s business needs. Very often there is no need to replace existing storage devices with new ones. When the need does arise to implement new technology, this should be done with the business needs in mind, and should not be linked to a single technology vendor."
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