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The data explosion has changed the nature of data storage. Adequate space must be provided for data and data must be backed-up. Given the continuing growth in data, scalability is a key concept - the ability of your storage capacity to grow in response to your business' growth. If your solution is not scalable it is a wasted investment that will prove obsolete within a short period of time.
However, simple provision of disks or indeed other media for storage is not enough. Your business should also consider these related factors:
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storage and backup facilities must be able to grow to meet the demands of your business - and grow without the need for costly upgrades.
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data must be held in a manner where it is readily and quickly accessible - no matter what media it is stored as.
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storage and backup must be centrally managed to prevent data fragmentation and loss of data integrity.
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storage facilities must have sufficient bandwidth to cope with the demand for the data - both at present and in the future .
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solutions must be user-friendly for staff to eliminate the need for costly retraining. |
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In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information (in cryptography, referred to as ciphertext). In many contexts, the word encryption also implicitly refers to the reverse process, decryption (e.g. "software for encryption" can typically also perform decryption), to make the encrypted information readable again (i.e. to make it unencrypted).
Encryption has long been used by militaries and governments to facilitate secret communication. Encryption is now used in protecting information within many kinds of civilian systems, such as computers, networks (e.g. the Internet e-commerce), mobile telephones, and bank automatic teller machines. Encryption is also used in digital rights management to restrict the use of copyrighted material and in software copy protection to protect against reverse engineering and software piracy. |
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Compression is the process of encoding data to take up less storage space and less bandwidth for transmission. Digital data are compressed by finding repeatable patterns of binary 0s and 1s. The more patterns can be found, the more the data can be compressed. Text can typically be compressed to approximately 40% of its original size, and graphics files from 20% to 90%. Some files compress very little. It depends entirely on the type of file and compression algorithm used
As with any communication, compressed data communication only works when both the sender and receiver of the information understand the encoding scheme. For example, this text makes sense only if the receiver understands that it is intended to be interpreted as characters representing the English language. Similarly, compressed data can only be understood if the decoding method is known by the receiver.
Compression is useful because it helps reduce the consumption of expensive resources, such as hard disk space or transmission bandwidth. On the downside, compressed data must be decompressed to be viewed (or heard), and this extra processing may be detrimental to some applications. The design of data compression schemes therefore involves trade-offs among various factors, including the degree of compression and the computational resources required to compress and uncompress the data. |
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