Staff often see saving electronic files as quick and easy, often not aware of the impact their endless mpegs and pdfs have on the company's storage. The words RAID, SAN and NAS aren't terms they usually come across, and many have the idea that 'just one more file' won't make a difference.
But consider that, say, 200 staff are each saving 300 or 400 files they don't really need and the scale of the demands on your company's storage becomes apparent. Is there ever a stage where you should say 'no, we don't have room to store that'?
How do you educate staff not to just save everything, and to cull their electronic files in the same way as they would clean up their desks?
Obviously it's important to keep some documents for legal and archiving purposes. But the numerous greeting cards, memos and project drafts don't always need to be among these.
As the layers of information needing to be stored grows, IT departments are forced to try and think laterally to manage the storage overload. Any solution they come up with must be acceptable in budget terms. How do you cope with storage needs which are doubling or tripling without blowing your budget, or eating up all your IT spend on storage requirements?
How does your IT department cope with meeting enterprise storage needs? What are some of the ways you educate users about storage? Talkback below or e-mail us your tips to edit@zdnet.com.au
One way for managed file server network.
Central storage user feedback/archival rating system. Archival rating A-keep indefinitely,B-review 12mths,C-review 2 months,X-delete. All new & review files are reported back on interactive form to users weekly, marked X or C (depending on policy). User may update at any time. Stats generated to identify users who mark all files "A" to avoid thinking about it. If potential critical file loss is a concern, files marked X could be dumped to offline storage prior to deletion.
Note: This is not a task users will enjoy (need to make lots of small decisions) so some archival policy guidelines and good form design for easy response will help as will visible management support.