All entrepreneurs must recognize the importance of having an effective data storage option in place. In the 21st-century, companies that take a digitized approach have a strong competitive advantage. A study from Deloitte that interviewed 2,000 small businesses found that companies with a strong digital engagement strategy had much higher ROIs. However, those companies quickly lost their competitive edge if they were affected by a data loss.
Unfortunately, data loss remains a massive concern. The average data loss incident costs a small business around $153 for every affected file. They must recognize the different types of scenarios that could lead to data loss and the measures they should take to mitigate those risks.
One option they should consider is RAID data storage. This is an approach that works on the data mirroring principle. Copies of data are replicated across many different devices. RAID storage can be used concurrently with data striping, which is the copying and partitioning of data across different segments of a disk.
Combating Data Loss Risks With RAID Storage
There are a number of instances when businesses can benefit from our RAID data storage. One of the biggest benefits of this type of data storage is safeguarding intellectual property.
If you have invested tens of thousands of dollars developing new software algorithms or other intellectual property, then you can’t take the risk of losing it to a hard drive failure or malware incident. However, due to the sensitivity of your project, you might not be able to take the risk of storing it on the cloud either. Cloud storage can be relatively secure, but not secure enough to take the risk of losing your most valuable intellectual property. This is one of the reasons that non-standard RAID recovery solutions are so important.
RAID data storage is a great way to replicate and backup your data without dealing with the countless security risks of the cloud. Unfortunately, even RAID data storage is fallible. The risks of data loss are low, but the following problems can lead to the loss of some of your most sensitive data:
- Failures of the physical media devices
- Widespread malware infection
- Failed updates or major software catastrophe
- Corrupted files that end up getting built into your RAID data redundancies
Regardless of the cause of your RAID media failure, the data loss can result in thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Depending on the importance of your data, this could have serious implications for your business. Therefore, it is necessary to make sure that you have a reliable RAID data recovery solution in place before anything goes wrong.
There are several tips that you need to consider if you want to protect your business against an RAID data failure:
- Make sure that you understand the complexities of RAID arrays. Whether you are using an RAID 0 or RAID 50, the data structure will be very complex. You need to appreciate the need to have a more specialized recovery solution.
- You need to make sure that your IT administrators don’t try to restore the data on their own. No matter how experienced they are in resolving general IT issues, they will almost certainly lack the expertise to handle an RAID data recovery. You need to make sure they are instructed to contact an expert.
- Make sure that all of your data is properly partitioned and striped before trying to rely on RAID storage.
Mirroring data is not always going to be easy. A number of problems can occur. The good news is that there are a lot of options to restore RAID data if anything goes wrong.