Challenges for Small/Medium Businesses

Information and the data behind it are acknowledged as any organization's most valued assets. Small to medium sized enterprises (SME) in particular are looking for cost effective, reliable, easy-to-use and secure solutions to their data business challenges:

• Exponential data growth - Companies are storing unprecedented amounts of information each year. The percentages vary, but analysts estimate that corporate storage requirements typically grow anywhere from 40 to 75 percent annually.
• Data outside the Data Center - Data is everywhere in companies today. From the mobile executive who boots up his laptop to check out the latest sales figures to the important client database stored on a remote server, huge chunks of corporate data have moved out of the data center--and out of the CIO's control. In fact, a recent Pepperdine University study found that 60 percent of corporate information resided on PCs outside the corporate LAN.
• Lack of skilled IT workers - Companies simply cannot find or afford to support the necessary IT resources to develop and maintain their own data management infrastructure. The increasing system complexity is stressing enterprise resources and overwhelming smaller enterprises. Complexity is beginning to reach a point beyond a user's ability to manage and secure their business data.
• Access to information from anywhere - The proliferation of PCs, laptops, hand-held and wireless devices and the increasing integration of these devices into the everyday business activities of an enterprise are generating demands for omnipresent and ubiquitous data access and management.
• Regulatory requirements - Rules regulating the management of business documents are not new. The government has required businesses to maintain business records for some time. What's different now is that electronic records, such as e-mail and instant messaging, are part of those regulations; consequently, the sheer volume of data that needs to be securely and privately archived, managed and accessed is daunting.

The iDataManager (iDM) suite of services from Storageplex works in a secure online environment and offers the SME, its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners a cost effective solution to protect data, manage growth, extract value, drive profitability, and meet regulatory requirements:

• a scalable, secure storage infrastructure with an inexpensive global VPN access;
• the ability to bring collaboration projects and business interfaces up and down on-demand without costly infrastructure;
• an easy method of securely aggregating and disseminating documents of any size to groups large and small without the burden on email hosts, or the expense and time associated with couriering documents;
• a complete archive of all project documentation including email;
• an audit trail for accounting and management purposes and;
• requires little in the way of IT support.