Archiving requirements
As the volume of electronic information continues to grow rapidly every year, the amount of new storage capacity installed follows this trend. IT departments do not develop in the same growth rate however and are ever more faced with limited resources and budget for managing all the (new) storage solutions.
As the hard disk prices continue to decline, many companies have resigned themselves to simply adding servers instead of putting policies into place for a more effective utilization of existing storage. Moreover, 80% of the data on most networks is inactive and as it all resides on hard disk it is a waste of valuable online storage capacity. This includes a high level of redundancy as (duplicate) data is often stored and backed-up several times.
Corporations can radically reduce their storage (management) costs with easy, cost-efficient solutions for the automatic backup and centralized management of their user data. This will allow organizations to reduce the amount of file and email servers by creating shared pools of common files and backing up only the changes to existing documents.
Archiving is simply the active management of information. Digital archiving is intended for the long-term storage, preservation and access to information. By consolidating traditional storage tiers you can create cost-effective and user-friendly digital archives which serve as your long-term storage. This simply involves the transformation of current and future storage repositories into active digital archives.
The timeframe for this depends on the information itself but numerous studies have shown that only 40% of digital information once created is ever viewed and only 20% is altered. Archiving alleviates this problem by identifying the older or little used information and manages it separately from the organisations active information.
The main benefits of archiving are:
- Reduce the risk
- Reduce the cost
- Increase the availability of information
