What is managed storage or a managed data storage solution? Put simply, it is a secure service that is designed to offload an organization’s data storage requirements to a third-party managed service provider. The storage can be located onsite or offsite, depending on the company’s needs, and the service provider they select.
Managed storage services can help you ensure that your data is available anytime, anywhere. It is a perfect solution for dynamic businesses or those with a widely distributed workforce that needs to access their data from multiple locations or in a variety of time zones. Cloud storage is also a type of managed storage. It seems like you cannot be in IT these days without discussing a cloud strategy.
The management of data backup and recovery in-house is becoming increasingly expensive, as the volume of data organizations acquire continues to rise. To more effectively manage and secure this amount of data, an increasing number of companies are working with external service providers for managed storage who then design and monitor critical workloads for them.
The amount of data you have to store and manage is growing daily. Yet the storage solution you use today could be completely different from what you’ll require months or years from now. That’s why you need a storage solution you can rely on as your needs evolve.
Definition of Managed Storage
Companies who are looking for a secure environment that provides maximum performance at every level are the perfect candidates for a managed storage solution.
Sometimes a company will rent dedicated storage or dedicated space in a data center maintained by the service provider, but many companies are reluctant to move critical data outside their private office space or data centers, as this could mean loss of control over the data. Thankfully with LightEdge’s managed storage service, IT employees can still maintain as much control as they want over their data.
A company that employs managed storage may also not have the resources to have a dedicated storage administrator, so they offload their data to a third-party provider. No matter what industry you are in, you should have a reliable solution that protects your information and makes it readily accessible when and where you need it.
Benefits of Using a Managed Storage Service
Managed storage can decrease capital expenses associated with buying and administrating storage systems. This is considered an upside of managed storage, as companies can simply order more storage capacity or services as needed, instead of having to purchase new hardware and software.
For predictability, top performance, and speed, LightEdge’s all-flash SSD SAN storage option offers simple scale-out options that adapt on the fly without affecting existing applications. There are also different types of managed storage to meet the needs of your business. Different options include:
All-Flash SAN for the Highest Performance
For predictability, top performance, and speed, LightEdge’s all-flash SSD SAN storage option offers simple scale-out options that adapt on the fly without affecting existing applications.
Features and benefits:
- Superior application performance and predictability
- Guaranteed minimum performance
Ideal use cases:
- VDI
- Analytics applications
- High performance eCommerce
- Ultra-high performance web servers
- Database servers
- Large CRM and other resource-intensive apps
All-Purpose SAN
Gain all the advantages of a flash-optimized architecture without compromising data mobility, resiliency, or data services.
Features and benefits:
- Cost-effective tiered storage
- Fully FIPS 140-2 compliant
Ideal use cases:
- Virtualization and private clouds
- Databases
- High I/O, transaction-intensive applications
- Server clustering
- Messaging applications such as Microsoft Exchange
- Cost-effective all-purpose storage that can easily be scaled
Challenges with In-House Storage Management
Companies are starting to face the various challenges by continuing to operate their storage management in-house, rather than working with an expert third-party service provider. Protection of data is the main concern for most IT teams. The consequences that come from a lack of security include malicious data theft and potential information leaks that can cause irreparable damage.
According to IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average total cost of a data breach in the United States is $3.92 million. The United States is the most expensive country for a data breach to occur by $8.19 million and healthcare within the United States is the most expensive industry to experience a data breach with the average cost coming in at $6.45 million. The average size of a data breach across industries in the United States is 25,575 records. As you can see managed storage security is essential.
Both internal and external threats to enterprise data are continuing to develop, with a marked increase in in-house managed storage threatening to relay sensitive data to external parties.
Another challenge enterprises face includes the costs associated with storing the amount of data accumulated. Even smaller enterprises can run into high figures, what with generally faster rates of growth and rapidly diversifying buyer personas.
This data needs to be managed efficiently, making sure that the right data is delivered to the right departments within the enterprise at a high rate of performance. Most importantly, the data acquisition process should be automated in order to effectively accumulate, process, and store data that will be needed by different branches of the company or different teams within the organization. All of the above costs can be steep if you do not partner with the right third-party managed storage provider.
The need for a global, real-time service to view emerging threats is crucial.
Why Managed Storage?
With all of these difficulties, companies are turning to a managed storage provider to help solves these issues. Offloading critical data helps to meet your evolving needs with a flexible and reliable managed data storage service.
If you are asking yourself, “Why should I seek out a managed storage provider?”, here are a couple of reasons LightEdge has seen from our customers.
Higher Performance
High performance managed storage is designed for moving large amounts of data around a network. This is especially valuable for moving around large quantities of complex data across the network. If you are an organization that owns more than one office or branch, then high performance managed storage is critical to the daily operation of your business.
One second could make all the difference in the world between a successful transaction and a very poor interaction. A 2017 Akamai study shows that every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by seven percent. Latency is no longer an option anymore.
In addition to losing customer sales, low performing managed storage can also cause an unsurprising lack of employee productivity. CSO Online reported that network inadequacies can cost companies an average of 71 hours of lost productivity per employee per year. For a 50-person company, this compares to $144,563 per year.
Factors that can prevent high-performance network and managed storage is the lack of access to fiber optic networks, high latency access technologies like DSL, and distance between users and content due to over-centralized peering between carriers.
Reliability
Forget downtime. Find a managed storage provider that has a fault-tolerant design and delivers greater than 99.9 percent availability. To process, store, and analyze massive amounts of data, your operations demand lightning-fast, highly reliable IT infrastructure. LightEdge’s storage is up to the challenge.
Even in this age of the cloud-almost-everywhere, reliable on-site data storage remains essential. As companies, and individuals, save more and more of their crucial information on storage devices, the need to be able to retrieve it quickly, and in the identical format from which it was saved, becomes more urgent than ever.
Scalability and Flexibility
A managed storage service provider supports an organization’s growth strategy. If a high degree of storage is required, that would be easily available and economically efficient. A managed data storage service scales with your business and provides the flexibility to grow and expand or downsize as needed.
Companies can relieve employees of routine tasks by adopting a managed storage approach and purchasing. This means free resources can be directed to your organization’s core activities and the achievement of company goals. You can start small and grow to a complex enterprise level.
The status quo has always been to house data and systems internally letting IT staff reinvent the wheel in 3-5-year hardware lifecycles. Inevitably, rebuilding your environment causes pain, takes longer, and typically costs more than was initially planned. In that light, the elasticity and flexibility managed storage offers can seem like a huge fix to the risks internal staff run in building IT infrastructure themselves.
Security
Compliant managed storage services and operating processes smooth the way to greater reliability and quality in storage management. This helps minimize risks and maximize security, which is particularly significant given the general sensitivity of customer data and the special importance of protecting confidential business information.
LightEdge’s highly-trained compliance and security experts take the guesswork out of keeping your business protected. Trust our expertise to ensure you are covered through our security and compliance services, including risk management, information security, audit preparedness, and support.
LightEdge builds security and redundancy into every detail of our managed storage solutions and service offerings, and our engineers have the know-how to advise you on meeting your compliance requirements, regardless of the industry standard. Learn how we can help you with CJIS, FedRAMP, NERC-CIP, and NIST compliance challenges.
Meet Your New Managed Storage Partner Today!
What would happen to your mission-critical infrastructure and data if a disaster were to hit this very second? Are you prepared? If not, or if you’re in need of a better disaster recovery solution. Thankfully, LightEdge can help. Now that modern IT practices have started to blend physical with virtual, and cloud with on-premises, safeguarding your applications and data requires several tools and methods.
LightEdge is committed to keeping our customers’ IT operations, critical applications, and data protected. We provide the technology and resources our customers require to get back to a production state that meets their RTO and RPO requirements.
LightEdge offers a comprehensive set of disaster recovery solutions to ensure uninterrupted performance of IT operations and mission-critical systems in the event of a disaster.
The reliable availability of business IT is essential to the management and livelihood of every company, large or small. All elements hinge on the dependability of your technology to deliver vital information right when you need it.
Redundancy is built into each of our data centers located in Des Moines, Kansas City, Omaha, Austin and Raleigh facilities. Each of our LightEdge facilities strive to deliver more than traditional data centers. We have created true Hybrid Solution Centers designed to offer a complete portfolio of high speed, secure, redundant, local cloud services and managed gateways to public clouds through our hardened facilities.
LightEdge’s expertise and long-term partnerships with leading providers like NetApp, SolidFire, HP, and EMC make it easy to customize, implement, and manage secure, compliant environments that can easily be adjusted as your business evolves. With an emphasis on customer care and data security, our consultative approach is invaluable.
Want to learn more about LightEdge’s managed storage and business continuity services? Contact one of our managed storage experts to get started or to schedule your private tour of any of our data center facilities. We have cloud, colocation, and business continuity experts standing by to answer any of your questions.
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