Data Archive: The Ultimate Solution for Long-Term Data Storage
Organizations are generating and collecting vast amounts of data at an unprecedented rate. As this data grows, so does the need for efficient, secure, and cost-effective long-term storage solutions. Data archiving offers a robust solution to these challenges.
What is Data Archiving?
Data archiving involves moving unused data to a separate storage system with lower storage and processing costs for long-term retention. Unlike backups, which are copies of existing data, data archiving contains historical data that businesses must store for various reasons, such as compliance, analysis, and AI.
Challenges with Long-term Data Storage
Challenges concerned with storing inactive data typically fall under 3 categories:
- High Costs of Storage: Archival data being stored within hot storage significantly increases the TCOs of any application.
- Performance Degradation: In addition to increased costs, inactive data filling up primary storage also takes up compute resources, causing performance loss for existing systems.
- Compliance with eDiscovery requests: One primary reason data is archived is to comply with authorities if litigation arises. Enterprises must keep records of transactions based on retention periods mandated by compliance regulations, making data storage more complex.
Why Is Data Archiving the Solution for Long-term Storage?
- Lowering TCOs: Data archiving significantly reduces enterprises’ costs of storing, managing, and retrieving inactive data.
- Compliance with regulatory requirements: Data archiving allows your enterprise to store data for extended periods while maintaining data integrity and accessibility.
- Improved Performance: Storing in-active data in cold, archival data tiers ensures that compute resources are freed, which now can be used to perform operations on active data and frequently used applications.
- Data Preservation: Effectively archiving your data means that your data can stay readable and intact for decades to come.
- Searchability: Data archiving solutions typically have search functionalities that allow you to query and retrieve data when needed, allowing you to access specific pieces of information when needed quickly.
- Scalability: As your data volumes increase, the volume of inactive data is also bound to shoot up. Modern archiving solutions are easily scalable to accommodate increasing data volumes.
- Security: Archived data is typically stored in a secure, immutable format, protecting it from unauthorized access, tampering, or accidental deletion.
Closing Thoughts
Unprecedented growth in data volumes and changing regulatory landscapes make it mandatory for businesses to store their inactive data for defined periods. Archiving your inactive data into cold data tiers is the ideal solution for your enterprise to reduce costs and improve performance while also complying with constantly evolving compliance regulations.
By investing in a robust data archiving framework, your enterprise can effectively address the challenges of long-term data storage. Picking the right archiving solution is just as important to optimize your costs, scalability, performance, and data security.
Solix offers an extensive suite of enterprise archiving solutions. Whether you need to retire your older applications or archive your unused files and emails, Solix can support your needs.
To learn more about how Solix can support your archiving projects, contact us
About the Author
Hello there! I am Haricharaun Jayakumar, a senior executive in product marketing at Solix Technologies. My primary focus is on data and analytics, data management architectures, enterprise artificial intelligence, and archiving. I have earned my MBA from ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad. I drive market research, lead-gen projects, and product marketing initiatives for Solix Enterprise Data Lake and Enterprise AI. Apart from all things data and business, I do occasionally enjoy listening to and playing music. Thanks!
