Good Practices in Enterprise Data Archiving
With the recent pandemic-induced changes in the business landscape, enterprises are witnessing an era of data explosion. This has created the challenge for enterprises to store and manage all of that data securely, safely, and cost-effectively. According to a recent survey, 95% of enterprises look at managing unstructured data as a critical challenge for their businesses. A data archiving plan, therefore, is an important part of the data lifecycle management policy, providing enterprises with a way to retain information while staying within a reasonable storage budget. Managing enterprise data has its own set of challenges and enterprises should look to overcome the following challenges while choosing a data archive solution.
Massive data growth
Due to the acceleration in operational data production, it is becoming increasingly challenging for enterprises to keep track of all the data sources and managing their storage. Enterprises are focused on data cleanliness as haphazard file storage arrangements are being actively replaced with systems and processes that manage to store large amounts of business data. Archiving data makes it easier to scale and manage data without wasting valuable administrative time.
Data Security
Enterprises do not archive data unless it is potentially useful in the future or is needed to address compliance around long-term retention requirements. Archived data need to be protected from any kind of loss, breaches, thefts and corruption. Data archiving solutions moves data to secure location enabling long term retention and storage. It provides secure locations for storing important information and retrieve it back for use as needed.
Compliance
Compliance regulations are constantly evolving and becoming more stringent. Enterprises following data archiving strategies can easily comply with a variety of regulations. This takes significantly less amount of time for administrators to conduct legal inquires and compliance reporting. They can stay updated about the changes and review data to identify any modifications in requirements.
Accessibility
A variety of users in the company might need to access the archived data. With the data archiving solution organizations can allow access with role-based permissions. Thus, teams could easily search and use the data without any assistance from the IT team.
Budget
According to a recent survey, 69% of the data stored has no value to the organization. Therefore, the amount of money enterprises is spending on data storage is probably more than required. Especially for the organizations operating under unstructured data which is typically text-heavy and not organized in any predefined way.
Data archiving reduces the cost of storage by archiving only essential data and eliminating the ones that no longer need to be retained. This means there are fewer primary data to backup, less use of resources such as hardware, software, energy, and data center costs as well.
Let us look at some of the good practices in enterprise data archiving.
- Differentiate clearly between your archive and backup solutions
- Pre-Archiving Data Sorting
- Do not configure archive storage in a way that could potentially become a single point of failure
- Establish clear policies defining what data should be stored in which tier of storage
- Do not treat all of your data the same with regards to archival
- Synchronize Data Archival and Data Lifecycle Management
- Plan for Regulatory Compliance
- Select the Right Archiving Tool
Backups are created as a means of data recovery and archives are designed for long-term storage of data and are not typically treated as a disaster recovery mechanism. However, archives can be prone to failures resulting in data loss, just as any other type of IT system can. Although traditional backups probably aren’t appropriate for archives, you do need a redundant copy of archived data.
One of the good practices of data archiving is to take a look at the data, categorize it into types and then prioritize, carefully considering which data is needed for ongoing operations and which can be moved to the archive. If you need to archive both structured and unstructured data, determine whether you want them stored in separate repositories or in one centralized archive.
All too often, an organization’s archives are treated as something of an afterthought. Data retention is an operational requirement, but because archives are filled with data that is rarely accessed, there might be pressure to use the least expensive storage solution possible. There is nothing wrong with using low-cost hardware for storing archived data, but the archives must not be constructed in a way that could result in a single point of failure. If an organization’s archive system were to fail, a huge volume of data could be lost.
The volume of data that enterprises produce can be huge, and there are costs associated with storing vast quantities of data. Organizations typically attempt to check this cost by using multiple storage tiers. It is important to have policies in place that stipulate what each storage tier is used for. These policies are usually based on the age of the data, data type, or some combination of the two. This approach can help the enterprise keep the most current data readily accessible, while also reducing storage costs by placing the oldest data onto less expensive media.
It is important to realize that it is a mistake to treat all of your data equally with regard to archiving. Data archiving requirements tend to vary widely based on the data type. It is also important not to overlook the fact that some data may not need to be archived.
A data archive has an impact on the data lifecycle. When you create your archival plan, consider the lifecycle of the archived data. For example, ask yourself for how long you want to retain archival data and when archival data should be purged. Update your data lifecycle management strategy accordingly. Be as specific as possible.
Make sure that your archive strategy is fully compliant with relevant compliance regulations. If you need to enforce strict compliance standards on half of the archival data, but the other archival data can be easily stored, then you might want to consider creating two separate archives.
There are many types of solutions that can help support your data archiving strategy. Some tools are dedicated to data archiving, while other solutions offer end-to-end data solutions with built-in archiving capabilities. The most important feature of any tool is an efficient search engine.
Finally, data archiving has a lot of benefits including reduced cost, better backup and restore performance, prevention of data loss and increased security and compliance but having a sound archival plan can profit the organization in multiple ways.