Welcome to the Storage Strategies blog. This blog is intended to help IT leaders learn about important topics regarding data storage management they need to understand to successfully manage their organization’s information assets. Everyone knows that data volumes are growing rapidly. IDC reports that enterprise data stores will grow an average of 60 percent annually. Considering the inevitable growth of information assets and the probable reduction of IT capital budgets over the next year (resultant from the global economic crisis), IT managers must actively scrutinize both the data their users are creating and the resources they plan to spend on hosting and protecting that data.

To start off here are ten questions regarding data management every IT manager must be able to address to be successful. Can you answer these questions?

1. How much data do we have?
2. How fast is our data volume growing?
3. What is our current data storage capacity?
4. What are our most critical applications/data?
5. Is our data backed up regularly and are data restoration processes and procedures tested regularly?
6. Are data backups and data archives stored at a secure off site location?
7. How long will it take to restore access to data if our primary data stores are corrupted or destroyed, and how much data are we willing to lose to recover?
8. Do we have a documented data retention policy and do local operating procedures ensure it is implemented?
9. Do we have policies and procedures for provisioning additional data storage to users?
10. Are our data storage personnel appropriately trained and certified?
    

If you can’t answer these questions because you don’t know or can’t give an affirmative answer, subscribe this blog and stay tuned for more.

To read my white paper, “Ten Things IT Management Needs to Know About Their Data Storage”, go to this link to down load it: www.storagestrategies.com