Generally speaking, IT managers in companies throughout the world have an excellent idea of what needs to be done to keep data protected but that challenge is greater than ever before.

We’re now dealing with considerably more data than before and there are more types of data to take into consideration. More transactions are electronic now and we use bank cards or pay for items online – we would maybe have used cash more in the past.

Sort out your architecture

Companies need an overall data protection architecture. There needs to be a consistent approach. Some companies have an app for one thing, an app for another and a whole host of different apps to help with different areas of data protection. You end up with islands of data protection that just won’t work. Tracking all that is not just extremely difficult, it becomes very expensive.

Ditch the tape

You have to get off the tape. Tape was the backup method of choice in the past but not anymore. We have far more advanced backup solutions now that are more reliable and allow you to store more data, more securely, taking up less physical space. So you would have thought that all the biggest companies would have moved away from backup tape but they’ve not. Most have but not all – certainly not completely. With the compression techniques we have today backup storage can be so much cheaper than tape ever was.

Head to the cloud

Consider the cloud. So many people are walking around with mobile devices. You can be sure your employees are and they want to work on the move. Move certain data to the cloud and your employees can access that data anywhere, anytime. We’re all using so many different apps now as well, and these apps are very data hungry. It’s another good reason to move all that data to the cloud. When you look at cloud computing, the number of people using it is not really the interesting aspect. It’s the growth rate. That growth rate is phenomenal. More and more people and companies are turning to cloud technologies and that trend will continue well into the future.