The advantages of maintaining data availability are clear, if not downright obvious; however, the challenges to achieve this can be considerable.
Indeed, analysts estimate that corporate data is growing at a rate of 50% to 70% annually, while companies struggle to do more with less.
And the solution does not simply lie with rolling out a storage management strategy; it must incorporate a well-defined plan and effective technology that can support a company`s overall business goals.
The reality is that storage management does not exist in isolation - it is part of an overall IT infrastructure that covers many disciplines.
Your information and data are only as available as the server on which it resides and the networks that support it. Indeed, it is only as secure as the systems that control access to it and as reliable as the applications that are used to create and modify it.
So, with a growing awareness of these interrelationships in the IT infrastructure, organisations are now moving away from viewing storage management as number of disparate products.
Distinct disciplines - operations, storage, security, lifecycle and service management - must be integrated to optimise the performance, reliability and efficiency of enterprise IT environment.
You should therefore opt for a solution provider that offers products that interact with each other, leveraging common services as well as offer the ability to develop an integrated management schema that can provide an unified view of how they interact with each other and relate to a company`s business environment.
Advancing to the next level entails intelligent storage management which includes four crucial steps:
* Identifying your current business processes and data assets.
* Classifying to processes and assets based on their business value.
* Defining storage policies and procedures to support business requirement.
* Automating the defined policies and procedures.
The above is not a one-time event but rather an ongoing activity.
Essentially, as new business processes are added, new business data is created and must be managed.
CA`s BrightStor Data Availability solution that encompasses BrightStor ARCserve Backup, BrightStor ARCseve Backup for Laptops and Desktop, BrightStor High Availability and BrightStor Storage Resource Manager, supports an intelligent approach to data management by providing comprehensive backup and recovery from laptop to mainframe.
Also, our BrightStor products incorporate critical functionality that for example comes with Unicenter, our network management environment as well as our security software eTrust, thus enabling companies to comprehensively manage and secure their entire IT environments.
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