Involve Users: Bring your users on board – bring the solution on board

Every year the amount of stored data grows by 60%, and yet only 15% of this is strategically significant. Administrators can be asked to control the growth of obviously useless data; looking at file age and type. But cleaning up this kind of content is only a part of the solution.

No matter how sophisticated your SRM tool, it doesn’t have the ability to distinguish important from non-essential data. Only users can determine the value of their data. The most effective policy has each user sorting through their own home share. A self-managing policy always leads to dramatic reduction in storage use.

Northern Storage Suite brings your users on board; makes them aware of what responsible storage is and shows what space can be reclaimed. Self-managing storage is made possible by providing users with the right information at the right time - reports on their oldest files, largest files, duplicates and media files when users have reached a threshold in their storage quota - making individual data management easy and efficient.

ACHIEVING THE GOAL
1. Define limits - Using Storage Reporter, reasonable usage can be identified. Storage quotas can then be set via Quota Server, either at individual user level or at group levels. Whether the quotas are hard or soft depends entirely on what policy your organization prefers. Quotas can also be set on content, blocking specific file types or group file types.

2. User-focused reporting - Reports on storage usage, such as file age, size, duplicates, and media files, are created in Storage Reporter and user can access these through the Storage Portal. Storage Portal notifications are triggered when certain storage levels are reached, notifying users of their current storage status. The notifications templates can be customized to suit your organization's needs.

3. Self-management - The notifications raise user awareness and prompts users to “self-manage” their allotted space via the Storage Portal. They can open, move or delete files or file groups directly within the Storage Portal.

4. Quota growth policies - Grace limit rules can be set to handle requests for increased storage quotas, different groups can have different rules, and the requests can be handled either manually or automatically.

Northern Storage Suite is available as a 30-day trial. Click on the link below to download the latest evaluation version (you will be redirected to the Northern website).

IMPORTANT: if you are an existing customer on maintenance please visit Northern's Support area to download the latest production version and service releases.