One of the challenges of outdated archive silos is that migrating data to a new hardware platform often is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. The reason: the archive data usually must be rewritten completely during a system change. Additional costs can occur if each new hardware generation requires archive license renewals. Therefore, hardware-independent solutions are necessary, which allow for more flexibility and protect business investments. Read more
The Most Important Drivers of Archiving
Todays’ requirements of data archiving request organizations to implement a flexible and future-proof archiving solution. Outdated archive silos often cannot fulfill the ever more complex archiving requirements due to their limitations and disadvantages. The most important drivers for data archiving are:
Compliance
Organizations are obliged to comply with internal and legal regulations for data archiving. These include GDPR, tax regulations, HIPAA, SEC17a-4, SOX and various industry regulations. The rules aim to protect the integrity, validity and availability of data during the retention period. Only if the data is secured and available in the long-run, a minimization of business risks is possible. In addition, organizations must be able to present data for legal purposes if required to use the data as evidence, e.g. in the field of product liability. Read more.
Risk minimization
During the data retention period, numerous risks can threaten or damage important business data. For instance, the risks include silent data corruption, unintentional data tampering, unauthorized manipulation or data loss caused by migrations or hardware replications. Damages or loss of data can result in enormous legal and economic consequences. Therefore, organizations are constantly challenged to minimize these risks.
Costs
Another driver of data archiving is the cost development in the IT sector. In general, organizations gain important flexibility by virtualization and realize cost advantages by an on-demand usage of IT resources. These advantages also apply for archiving: To keep costs under control, organizations have to increase their IT efficiency in all areas and optimize their IT infrastructure. On the one hand, the ever-growing data amounts require a growth control of the primary storage. On the other hand, a flexible scalability of the storage capacities at justifiable costs must be enabled. Often, this requires a technological change in the storage landscape, which results in a data migration to other systems. In this case, data is moved to cheaper storages (HSM), achieving lower costs. A flexible and open archiving solution protects business investments and enables a more efficient usage of storage capacities and thus reduces TCO.
Technological progress
Retention periods of ten, thirty or more years apply to many types of documents and data. During this time, the storage industry experiences rapid technological progress. In addition, during the retention period data must be migrated several times with uncertainty which storage technology will remain standard in the future. This requires a secure and economic management of the archived data. The answer: Increasing flexibility and adaptability of archiving solutions related to the infrastructure.