data management ICT
IT infrastructure has without doubt become the backbone of any corporate environment. Whether affecting email, servers or software, any downtime or degradation in service impacts the efficiency of the entire
organisation’s operations, making it harder for employees to do their jobs and in turn affecting customer loyalty and profits
fragmentation can significantly impede the performance of the storage, removing and preventing fragmentation can dramatically improve the speed it takes to access data.
Poor processes present another hurdle many businesses fail to pass. While some companies take time to manage their IT systems by filing documents into relevant folders and assigning varying degrees of access restrictions depending on clearance, this procedure is rarely followed for deleted items. In addition, little differentiation is made between those items which may at some point need to be retrieved and those that should be deleted permanently. These factors mean that deleted items folders and Recycle Bins are often the weak spots in an organisation’s IT estate, as they can hold unsecured, yet business critical, information.
The risk of an unhealthy IT environment IT infrastructure has without doubt become the backbone of any corporate environment. Whether affecting email, servers or software, any downtime or degradation in service impacts the efficiency of the entire organisation’s operations, making it harder for employees to do their jobs and in turn affecting customer loyalty and profits. It is therefore of paramount importance to keep IT infrastructures healthy.
Implementing defragmentation and deletion management tools ensure data is not only stored contiguously but provides a clear division between what files are securely deleted and what files need to be retrievable. This allows the IT estate to work quicker, while using less energy to retrieve, amend and find files, and thereby ensuring that the systems are working as efficiently as possible.
Well run IT infrastructures can even act as something of an assurance policy for the entire organisation, by minimising the risk of an outage and increasing the lifespan of existing machines. It is no secret that technology has a limited life expectancy and this will never change. As such, taking steps to extend the IT lifespan is an important way to minimise costs in the long-term and ensure a continually optimised IT infrastructure in the medium-term.
Compliance is a further consideration for businesses, particularly as legislation continues to ramp up. Increasingly stringent laws such as the EU Data Protection Act and the UK Bribery Act, mean businesses are now becoming more accountable for the data they hold. Being able to manage data effectively is now a requirement by law, whether that means securely deleting files or being able to quickly retrieve specific information on request. In
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most cases, regulatory bodies will be unwilling to wait for extended periods for data to be located, and every hour spent searching for a file (or ensuring it has been deleted securely) is an hour wasted generating income for the business.
Finally, in the age of tightening budgets, businesses are trying to get the most out of both their staff and equipment. Tasks increasingly need to correlate with results, and if too much time is spent trawling through IT systems or retrospectively defragmenting systems, productivity will be negatively impacted. Instead, businesses should tackle IT optimisation from the ground up, ensuring a solid infrastructure is in place before trusting it to support complex IT systems and virtual environments. A healthy IT infrastructure is too often dismissed as wishful thinking but in reality, with a small amount of forethought, it is completely achievable. As organisations increasingly look for ways out of the current web of expenditure to hold IT infrastructures together, it is essential for them to take a step back and address the underlying issues at hand.
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