Businesses of all kinds could benefit from having their secure document storage in the same place as the rest of their applications, it has been claimed.
With more and more businesses investing in a document scanning service to get their information stored digitally, some might wish to take some tips from the recent comments by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Europe.
Having important data stored online or on a secure server allows firms to distribute it as and when needed, without having to suffer the delays of sifting through paperwork and delivering copies of the physical documents to their intended recipients.
However, there must also be some consideration for where the secure document storage will be and how it will work alongside the firm’s other applications.
SNIA chairman Bob Plumridge noted that an increasing number of companies are seeing the benefits of unified storage, whereby everything is kept in the same place, rather than having specific means of storage for individual products.
"You just have this idea of one type of storage that can be used for all of the data storage requirements. So it doesn’t matter if you’re storing Oracle databases, online transactional systems, or Word documents, or PowerPoint files or email systems – all of that data resides on one storage platform that’s able to cope with all those different data types," he said.
"In the past, it’s very much been specialised, so that email systems have had their storage, … transactional systems, customer relations-type systems have had their storage and everything’s moved very much along the lines of dedicated storage to those individual applications and those individual uses."
The expert added that unified storage brings all of these requirements into one solution, rather than having them separated.
Mr Plumridge also feels that all companies, regardless of how big or small they are, can benefit from investing in this type of data management storage.
"I think, increasingly, these organisations have to cope with all sorts of different data types. If they have a web presence, then they almost certainly have the ability to take orders over the web – that could then be a database-type system," he concluded.