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In association with HP Storage: How storage can make you happy

Storage - it's not the most exciting word, true, but it is an issue that cannot be ducked in today's highly competitive and security-aware business environment.

The message is quite simple: ignore it at your peril. Compliance and theever increasing threat of data compromise have pushed storage to theforefront of the information security agenda. Organisations need toensure data integrity and guarantee legitimate accessibility. Theircustomers and partners need to know this, too.

A properly thought-out approach to storage will not only improvesecurity, it can actually benefit the company as a whole. For example,precious time spent searching for badly managed data adds considerableinvisible overheads to the running of a business. Think of the time youhave wasted on many occasions - and the frustration that went with it -trawling through your personal inbox or hard drive to locate just onefile.

Foolish would be the business, whatever its size, that never backed upvaluable data on a regular basis; but it's surprising how manyenterprises fail to really think about not just when to back up, but howand what with. There are stories of companies that have been dutifullybacking up for weeks and months, only to find that, day after day, theyhad been rotating a series of blank tapes - because no-one had botheredto check that the back-ups were actually working. For an effectivestrategy, you need to match your business model with the right storagetechnology.

Access to data is also vitally important in the age of compliance. Whenasked, a business needs to know exactly where to lay their hands on dataand to be able to extract it with accuracy and speed. Now thatlegislation is becoming standardised for the UK, as in the US,compliance is clearer and there is technology available to automate theprocess of compliance, making it less time-consuming. And rather thanbeing a burden, it can actually give an organisation much greatervisibility of the information within its business.

Today's storage solutions are able to provide all that, using tried andtrusted technology such as tape. Far from being yesterday's kit, tape isjust as valuable as it ever was. In some ways, as you will discover,it's actually superior to more recent technologies.

So take a fresh look at storage. I believe this area is hugely relevantto IT security professionals and HP is delighted to sponsor this SCguide to storage. The articles that follow will give you a valuableinsight into both the available technology for storage solutions and thereasons for using them. Even better, a good storage strategy will notonly help you meet legislation but also improve efficiency among yourcolleagues.

It might even make them happier.

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