Handshake 2.0 asked Doug Mauer, President and CEO of Brush Mountain Data Center, LLC, for his expertise on this scenario:

My company, Bionanoparametric, Inc. has grown from a single founder, home-based start-up to an established company located in a corporate research park with twelve employees, each with desktops or laptops, networked with one server.

During our focus on growth, what have we neglected - as do most small companies - with regard to data management and data security?

Doug Mauer replies:

This is a typical question which gets asked later in a company's growth than it might have been. What we see here at Brush Mountain Data Center is that once the question is asked, there is already a large, expensive mess to be cleaned up.

Small companies are busy doing other things, such as growing their businesses. Data management is often thought of as "too expensive right now." 

It is therefore understandable that lack of foresight and planning with respect to organizational digital document infrastructure is common.

However, a good plan for digital document storage is inexpensive to formulate and provides a sounding board for infrastructure purchases as they become affordable. Any plan is better than no plan.

The good news is that many inexpensive entry level options can scale well as a company grows.

To begin designing a plan for digital document storage, the lead on the project needs to ask this question: 

How important are the documents that my employees create daily to the growth of my company?

An answer to that question can establish implementation of a digital data plan as a not "too expensive" priority.

Brush Mountain Data Center, LLC, specializes in data security and remote data backup services.  Offering server co-location and offsite disaster recovery protection, Brush Mountain Data Center serves as your company’s “data vault in the mountains."