How are Huge Corporate Files Archived?

Large corporations accumulate massive amounts of data through direct collection from websites, apps, surveys, and POS systems and indirect collection from IoT devices, public sources, third-party providers, partnerships, and mergers and acquisitions. These datasets can be categorized into structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data, all meant to be dealt with differently.

This often leads to redundant data, integration challenges, and governance concerns. Data retention policies, regulatory requirements, and competitive pressure also contribute to data accumulation. Effectively archiving these files is absolutely essential to maintaining data accessibility, compliance, risk mitigation, and optimizing the costs of storage and computing resource allocation.

But, how do these large corporations archive these files?

Decommissioned legacy systems – retirement

M&A activities, governance policies, regulations, and legal hold requirements have led to redundant applications and reliance on legacy systems. These applications often have very high TCOs (total costs of ownership) and operational limitations. Big organizations tackle this challenge by retiring/decommissioning older applications and moving existing datasets to cold, archival storage.

To archive decommissioned systems and applications, data teams typically take the following steps:

Extract data from legacy systems before decommissioning
Convert data to suitable formats for cold storage in archival systems
Enrich data with metadata and proper tagging to improve accessibility
Create retention and purge policies based on applicable regulations
Store extracted data in long-term archive solutions

Unstructured Files and Documents

Documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and other multimedia files constitute nearly 80% of enterprise data.

unstructured data volume by year — Source: Edge Delta

According to reports, unstructured data volumes are expected to grow to over 150 zettabytes within 2025. Ensuring these files are effectively managed is crucial, as many aren’t accessed more than once. Files that aren’t essential to operations or mandated to be retained by regulations can be purged. In contrast, the other files can be moved to lower-cost storage tiers to free up active storage systems for operation data flows.

Archiving Strategies for Unstructured Data:

Using data classification tools to organize files by importance and regulatory requirements.
Applying metadata tags for better accessibility through search
Establish ownership and access controls, assign ownership to designated teams and departments
Create and apply retention and purge policies on the archival data
Move files to cold storage tiers on-cloud or on-prem servers.

E-mails and communications

Businesses receive a lot of mail every day. Due to compliance requirements, companies may be mandated to store and maintain records of email threads from core stakeholders like customers, suppliers, internal employees, and others. Enterprises must invest in an email archiving tool to effectively manage these emails.

Archiving strategies for emails, chats and other communications:

Carefully assess inboxes and stakeholders’ criticality in terms of access to emails and communications
Index emails based on sensitivity, need and compliance requirements
Set business value to the chats and emails and implement retention and purge policies
Implement policies to preserve and retain critical pieces of communication to comply with eDiscovery and litigation requests
Choose the most appropriate email archiving tool based on your need and implement the archive

Databases and Structured Datasets

As discussed above, archiving inactive databases and structured datasets is straightforward compared to the other datasets. However, optimizing data governance, access controls, retrieval, and accessibility while lowering costs is still a core point for deliberation across data teams in all large enterprises.

Archiving strategies for inactive databases and structured datasets:

Determine the different databases to be archived and categorize them based on sensitivity, need, and compliance requirements
Establish clear retention periods based on legal and business requirements
Choose appropriate storage solutions (cloud, on-prem) based on volume, access, and costs.
Establish governance, retention, and purge policies
Move data to the archival tier and regularly assess archival policies to ensure effectiveness and compliance with norms

Archiving inactive data is a multi-faceted approach, especially in large organizations, where data is stored in different locations, under different regulations, and owned and managed by different stakeholders. While individually, the processes and strategies applied to archive data across corporations and data teams vary, most organizations follow the above mentioned steps along with a few tweaks to suit their core business needs. While archiving benefits large organizations in several ways, picking the right vendor to help archive data is crucial.

We at Solix, with decades of experience in managing enterprise data, are a leader in the archiving space. The Solix Enterprise Archiving suite enables organizations to retire their legacy applications while archiving files, emails, and inactive databases without compromising the security or integrity of data. With inbuilt governance capabilities, ensure your enterprise data operations are safe, secure, and compliant.

To learn more on how Solix can solve your archiving need, visit our webpage

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!