Who should be looking at and considering file
archiving?
File
archiving is a valuable tool for any storage organisation that
needs to free up storage capacity -- shifting unused data off of
active storage systems. For example, you may not know if you'll
need a piece of data in five years, but you don't know if it's safe
(appropriate) to delete it either, so you place the data into a
long-term storage system where it's accessible if needed. That
long-term storage is the archive. Design documents, software builds
and images are just a few of the data types that are often
relegated to archives.
Of course, many companies save data to comply with government,
industry or self-imposed regulations. There's a great deal of
concern with established regulations, like the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but the recent changes to the
Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP) state that anyone possibly
subject to a future court proceeding has to be able to produce the
required information. This impacts a much broader audience than SOX
or other compliance regulations because anyone who might be
involved in litigation must take appropriate steps to protect and
preserve their data.
Still, if you determine that a piece of data has no possible
future value or bearing on future litigation, there is no reason to
archive it -- you can delete it. Data that can be reproduced or
regenerated may not need to be archived. Another school of thought
takes a more conservative approach and keeps every piece of
data.
Go back to the beginning of the
File Archiving FAQ Guide.
Is file archiving just for companies and applications that have
to meet regulatory compliance requirements?
It's a myth that file archiving is only for regulatory
compliance. In reality,
archiving has been around for decades -- well before the hype
of compliance -- but compliance needs have become a serious driver
for archiving. File archiving is for any valued data in any
business of any size. This includes traditional documents and
emails, along with a myriad of other digitally created content,
like photos, movies, sound files, etc. All that data can have
monetary or nonmonetary value to a company.
Moving forward, archiving is not just for the enterprise. It can
have a huge impact in organisations of all sizes, including small
and midsized business (SMB), as well as the small office/home
office (SOHO). Down the road, we'll see more file archiving done
discretely in a simple, easy-to-use manner.
Go back to the beginning of the
File Archiving FAQ Guide.