It’s a Maze! — What Kind of Storage Do I Need for My Business?

  • What Kind Of Storage Do I Need? Follow the path!

“What kind of storage do I need, to help run my business?”

That depends on what kind of business you run, of course! How much data do you create, or receive, and need to store and access? How many employees use your business data? Do you need to access it from offsite? Do you collaborate, sharing the same data a lot? How much data redundancy do you need to secure your valuable assets? How fast do you need to access your data on a regular basis?

Wow, that’s a lot of detailed questions, isn’t it!?

Well, let’s not address them now — but check out this fun decision-tree infographic below!

I promise in the near future I’ll put together some thoughts on how to choose different kinds of storage, for different business needs. But just to get us oriented — in broad strokes, your high-level decisions will come down to a few high-level choices. Fast access needed, or is slow OK? Massive amounts of data, or one computer at a time?

Our LaCie team put together this amusing graphic. They really meant it for home users and tech enthusiasts looking for backup. But even for your small business, it’s a decent place to get an overview, because it touches on most of the high-level categories of storage: Offline Archive (DVDs), Cloud (remote massive storage you access over the internet), DAS (direct-attached storage — an external hard drive), or NAS (network-attached storage) which lets many computers back up to one place, and often contains multiple drives that can backup redundantly or stripe data side-by-side so it streams off the disks really fast!

It’s a bit of a rat’s maze, but that’s why it’s so fun — like a game! See if you can follow its twisted turns, and let me know if it gave you some idea of where your needs may take you!

What Kind Of Storage Do I Need? Follow the path!

Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.

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