Cost-Savings

Companies lose a significant amount of money each year because of their failure to archive older data, retaining it on expensive production systems and storage, and including it in operational processes such as mirroring, security and backup.

• Archiving can reduce costs by helping you to make the best use of the capacity that you already own. As older data amasses, it uses space on expensive disk infrastructure (we call it "capture storage" because it is designed to capture data as quickly as production applications and users create it) and increases the pace at which organizations must purchase additional expensive disk infrastructure. By archiving data that has low access frequency or little chance of re-reference to less expensive "retention storage" -- including inexpensive magnetic disk, magnetic tape or optical media, you can increase the operational life of the capture storage the company already owns and slow the rate of new acquisitions.
• Cost-savings also accrue to the reduced load on heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in data centers represented by archival (retention) storage as compared to production (capture) storage. Truth be told, tape and optical disc consume less power and generate less heat per GB of information stored than do always-on capture-oriented disk arrays. Archives, you could argue, are inherently greener technology than capture storage repositories.
• Archiving data also saves the organization money by improving the efficiency of data protection systems your company may have deployed. Tape backup and disk mirroring are common techniques for preserving mission-critical data against the possibility of a disastrous interruption.  You could call these techniques a sort of "shadow infrastructure" protecting the data handled on the production infrastructure. In the absence of intelligent archiving, the volume of data that needs to be protected increases exponentially, placing strain on the shadow infrastructure as well as the production environment.  With archiving, the volume of data requiring "real time" replication for disaster recovery decreases.  This, in turn, can breathe new life into your shadow infrastructure, enabling you to complete backups within tight operational windows, for example, and forestalling the need to refresh or replace your existing backup or mirroring solutions.  Moreover, with archiving, you can better tune your information security strategy so that you buy what you need to protect your most important assets rather than taking a "shotgun" approach.

Be sure to check back with this site for the latest information on the real world cost-savings realized by businesses that undertake an archiving initiative.

Risk Reduction

Risk reduction has several meanings in the corporate front office vocabulary.  Each sets a context for the business value of archiving.

• Investment risk:  When a company invests in technology, it exposes itself to a risk of early investment obsolescence.  Often times, investments become obsolete when their processing power or bandwidth or capacity becomes overwhelmed by workload more quickly than was anticipated.  Archiving can't prevent all types of technology investment obsolescence, but it can prolong the life of investments in technologies such as storage and disaster recovery services by offloading data assets that do not require capture storage or real time protection services.
• Legal risk:  Regulations and laws governing data management are on the rise.  In some cases, the focus is on managing retention and deletion of data in a manner consistent with good corporate governance.  In other cases, the mandate focuses on the privacy and security of information assets.   And in still other cases, regulators and legislators have set their sights on the preservation of records that may have probative value as evidence in a civil or shareholder action.  Intelligent archiving is the only way to comply with these requirements, reducing the risk of legal liability for the company.
• Disaster and security risk:  The efficacy of a disaster recovery or business continuity plan is measured by the metric "Time to Data."  The amount of time required to restore access to a reliable set of mission-critical data is what separates a temporary inconvenience from a full-blown business disaster.  Through the use of intelligent archiving, which moves older data that is less frequently accessed from the complement of data that must be provided real time protection, protective techniques such as tape backup and disk mirroring will do a better job.  The risk of catastrophic loss will be reduced.  In the case of security services, the same rationale applies.  The more fine tuned the security system, the better it can protect data assets that require protection.  Archiving ensures that data that is no longer being accessed with any frequency can be removed from the infrastructure most threatened by hackers, malware and other threats.  Security targets will be reduced in number, enabling security measures to be better tuned and potentially more effective.

 This page will continue to monitor the real world advantages of archiving from the perspective of risk reduction.  Stay tuned.

Process Improvement

Can archiving improve business processes?

The answer is an unqualified "Yes!"

• Productivity:  As files amass, databases grow, and other types of data (email, electronic content management system output, images and video, just to name a few) accumulate over time, searches for specific data become more time consuming, applications take longer to load, and the efficacy of automation is reduced.  With intelligent archiving, you can expedite searches, reduce application load times, and add potentially hundreds of hours of wasted time each year back into productive work.
• Decsion Support:  Once archived, historical data should be in a well indexed and highly searchable form.  This enables its speedy inclusion in decision support processes, such as historical analysis.
• Data Modeling:  Building an intelligent archive includes the creation of a data centric model of the business:  mapping data to business processes, tasks and workflow on the one hand and to tech infrastructure on the other.  If you know the costs of the infrastructure components, you can readily determine the cost to support a specific business process from a technology perspective.  This can be of enormous value when assessing the costs to the organization of acquiring or building a new line of business, since comparisons can be drawn between the costs of existing business processes that are similar to the new business lines.  Rather than being construed as an overhead expense, IT can actually become the go to guy of the front office through better data modeling.