Sooner or later, your small business will need more space for data storage. Information in the form of e-mails, documents, presentations, databases, graphics, audio files and spreadsheets is the lifeblood of most companies, and the applications that run and protect your business require a lot of disk space. In addition, a number of trends are fueling our growing hunger for storage:

• Recent government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, require businesses to maintain and back up a variety of data they might have otherwise deleted.
• For legal reasons, many small businesses are now archiving e-mail messages dating back five or more years.
• The pervasiveness of viruses and spyware requires ever-more vigilant backups--which requires ever-more storage capacity.
• Each new version of a software application or operating system demands more hard-drive real estate than its predecessor.
• The growing need to store large media files, such as video, and make them available to users on a network is generating demand for more sophisticated storage solutions.

Storing information and managing its storage is critical to a company's behind-the-scenes success. Fortunately, there are many storage solutions software available.

Online storage or Cloud Storage. Cloud storage is storage space on commercial data center accessible from any computer with Internet access. Data storage programs are usually provided by a service provider. A limited storage space may be provided free with more space available for a subscription fee.  Examples of service providers are Amazon S3, Google Drive, Sky Drive etc.

By backing up your most important files to a secure, remote server, you're protecting the data stored at your place of business. With cloud storage management software you can easily share large files with clients, partners and others by providing them with password-protected access to your online storage service, thereby eliminating the need to e-mail those large files.

Network-attached storage software.Network-attached storage (NAS) provides fast, simple, reliable access to data in an IP networking environment. Those storage software solutions can also offload file serving from other servers on your network, thereby increasing performance. A network storage software system allows you to consolidate storage, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing costs; simplify storage administration and data backup and recovery; and allow for easy scaling to meet growing storage requirements.

Storage virtualization software.The management of storage and data is becoming difficult and time consuming. Storage management tools helps to address this problem by facilitating easy backup, archiving and recovery tasks by consuming less time. Storage virtualization aggregates the functions and hides the actual complexity of the storage area network (SAN).

Storage virtualization can be applied to any level of a SAN. The virtualization techniques can also be applied to different storage functions such as physical storage, RAID groups, logical unit numbers (LUNs), LUN subdivisions, storage zones and logical volumes, etc.