Data is the gold of the 21st century. Safeguarding and making business-critical data available is therefore of crucial importance for an organisation's success. Users make increasingly heavier demands on the internal IT department to support their specific business process. Losing business-critical data can cost an organisation lots of money and can even endanger the organisation's continuity.
On average, the amount of data increases by 60% to 100% per year. It is expected that this growth will increase even further, on the one hand because of the increasing digitalisation of information, on the other hand as a result of legislation. Even so, data is often 'taken for granted' and not enough attention is paid to correctly setting up data storage and data security. To safeguard the quality and the reliability of the saved data, it is essential to transform traditional data storage into a transparent storage setup to be able to operate in a facilitating and adaptive way. By setting up data storage based on the data's life cycle, the information can be provided to the organisation in a facilitating, cost-effective, transparent, flexible, adaptive and scalable way. A well thought-out data storage strategy takes into consideration the specific procedures and processes used within an organisation, internal and external clients, as well as internal/external factors such as market developments and rules/legislation.
To provide (IT) organisations insight into the discrepancy between preconditions, wishes and requirements with regard to data organisation and the actual storage setup, Inter Access offers a data management scan aimed at: Business continuity, Recovery, Archiving, Information knowledge, Network and Storage. BRAINS is a standardised approach which provides quick and well-organised insight into the current storage setup and which compares this setup with the internal and external factors which should be the basis of an optimal storage setup. After the differences have been analysed, an advice is given on which areas need to be changed with regard to Business continuity, Recovery and Archiving (and with which priority). In addition, assistance will be provided to gain insight into the accepted recovery time (during which the functionality should be made available again) and how much data loss is acceptable. Furthermore, assistance is provided to gain (better) insight into the organisation's information need and which influences lead to data growth (Information knowledge). Finally, guaranteed performance and capacity (Network and Storage) will be dealt with.
The standardised BRAINS approach consists of 5 steps: