Consolidating your data protection platforms and practices should be at the top of your 2008 to-do list.

Organizations spend a lot of time making copies of data to minimize risk and improve business continuity. Considering the amount of data retained on primary storage in addition to backup copies, offsite replicas and archived content, management of an organization's data repositories can be a daunting task. This is especially true if every copy is initiated through different processes, applications or management interfaces. Fortunately, many vendors are now offering unified data management platforms aimed at relieving the capacity and management headaches prevalent when point solutions are deployed in the data center. A unified data management and recovery platform can improve performance, decrease complexity and reduce costs, in addition to making all copies of data more useful and accessible for electronic discovery purposes.