What Every Small Business Owner Should Know Today

(StatePoint) Given how much has changed about the way people do business over the last few years, experts say it may be time for entrepreneurs to rethink how they store and protect company data, and collaborate with their teams.

According to Brian Mallari, a marketing director in Western Digital's hard drive business unit, a shared storage or network attached storage (NAS) solution can help, and here's why:

• Cost: As every owner of a small- or mid-sized business (SMB) knows, cutting costs without cutting corners is key to protecting the bottom line. While cloud storage fees can incur ongoing costs, adopting a NAS solution is a great way to pay once while keeping sensitive data local to the office or home.

• Capacity: Before selecting a storage solution, consider your needs. From wedding photographers to graphic designers, many businesses need a storage solution that can grow over time. Popular NAS storage drives for small and medium businesses, such as the WD Red family of products from Western Digital, range in capacity from 1 terabyte (TB) to 18TBs, making them a good solution for those who work with large amounts of data.

• A shifting workplace: With hybrid and remote workplaces becoming the norm for businesses of all sizes, this has added new challenges for business owners and their staff wishing to easily collaborate, edit files and work with shared files and databases. With a NAS storage system, all users' PCs and laptops can be assigned permission to access the storage solution, giving them the ability to load files and data wirelessly or via connected ports. What's more, such a system can help protect your team's work and data against loss from a network outage or potential cyberattacks, as remote/home data can be backed up to the storage device itself at the office. Because NAS solutions use several hard drives, they can provide protection of data via redundancy, also referred to as RAID. In other words, should one drive fail, the data lives on.

• Getting set up: Getting set up with a SMB NAS storage system is easy. The solutions are available at consumer electronics stores and online, and you can choose from a NAS system that includes from two to 24 slots or "bays" for hard drives to make sure all your data is covered. Most NAS solutions, especially two- and four-bay solutions, can simply plug into an internet router via Ethernet.

To learn more about NAS-ready data storage options, visit westerndigital.com.

"In today's world, small- and mid-sized businesses need both reliable, affordable data storage solutions, as well as tools that allow for collaboration among workers near and far," says Mallari. "Rethinking how data is stored can help entrepreneurs achieve both these goals."