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How Much Is Your Data Worth?
- February 16, 2011 by Gonzalo Rodriguez, Digital Systems Architect
As a society that lives on a “more is better” mantra, our digital lives are pushing current storage capacities, whether work or personal.
Businesses from small to enterprise are expanding mailbox limits and network drive size allotments to support vast amounts of data. As they manage the idea of ever-expanding storage servers, we try to build upon the idea of redundancy. Whether it be an offsite data center like Rackspace or local backups managed via Symantec BackupExec, IT managers past, present, and future work hard to tame the beast that is data management.
Enough about IT. What role does the marketer or product manager play in this game? How much is your data worth to you – your customer information, sales reports and projections, historical data, etc.? Could you function effectively as a marketer without this key data? Probably not. If you value your data, take responsibility for educating yourself, at least at a high level, in the principles of data management. Work with your IT managers to develop solutions that are most appropriate for your business needs and their goals.
Your high-level plan should identify any core dependencies you have on “current” data – data that is updated hourly and used to make decisions vs. static data that is generated monthly or quarterly. Any real-time data you use should be first on the list of backup and recovery, but the marketer should also have a contingency plan in the event a loss happens and your data is unavailable.
Working with your IT team will go a long way to ensuring both teams recognize which data is most important, but also the most difficult to manage. Empathy that is equally weighted can be critical to ensuring successful data management.
Trust me, taking interest in what “IT” does, is very appreciated by most IT professionals. Just don’t try and tell them how to do it :).
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