Storage Trends for Small Businesses

With the rapid growth of storage methods throughout the years, small businesses have been afforded a wide variety of options that were not at their disposal in past years.  The growth of servers and options such as cloud computing have greatly enhanced storage ability at lower costs.  Here are some trends that have seen growing popularity amongst small businesses in recent years.

Cloud Based Storage

One trend that everyone agrees on is that cloud computing is a good medium for small business storage.  Smaller firms look at cloud-based services as a way of reducing their IT spending by outsourcing specific IT services.  Small businesses will likely start using cloud-based storage more and more for active data stores as well as archival and disaster recovery.  It would seem likely that we will see continued adoption of cloud backup as budgets will remain tight and companies will need to do more with less. 

Cloud Computing and Virtualization

The cloud is really an extension of virtualization technology.  Instead of a single server being virtualized, however, the cloud represents the virtualization of a large group of computing resources or an entire data center. But virtualization is proving hugely popular with small businesses, many of which have little or nothing to do with the cloud.

There is a steady move to virtualization by small businesses in order to consolidate their servers or virtualize their desktops. 

Network Storage

Small businesses are famous for having user files residing on PCs. As they get larger or more sophisticated, they might add a file server where everyone store files. But ever-expanding data requirements are leading more firms to consider network storage which has traditionally been the province of larger enterprises. This approach offers a far greater amount of space that you can pack into a file server.  The trend toward easily managed network storage will accelerate as smaller businesses begin leveraging the capabilities that centralized storage offers.  Small businesses that want to keep their storage in-house will base storage-buying decisions on reliability, ease of management, and on finding the best pricing possible that meets those requirements.

Decreased Storage Complexity

As enterprise-class storage filters down the food chain, it tends to be adopted first by tech-savvy firms who have enough internal IT sources to understand and properly configure systems. At a certain point in the adoption curve, though, the storage vendors start to comprehend the value of the SMB market and begin to redesign and simplify their products to suit a new set of customers.  Thus, what we see now is a big reduction in the management complexity that used to accompany networked storage and traditional storage processes.  The latest batch of products, for example, is far easier to operate than their relatives from a couple of generations back. That doesn’t mean that the boss can use them, unless he or she has some level of basic computer knowledge.  Typically, an IT generalist should be able to operate modern small business storage tools.

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