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In the 3rd party of this series, it should be understood that Lady Backup does not consider a backup an archive. As my colleagues know, I will strongly argue with anyone who considers backup tapes to be an archive.
Now that you understand that, what are the main things you should think about with an archiving solution? I’ll frame the discussion in the context of the 3 key benefits of archiving I discussed in the last blog posts (Part 1/Part 2).
Benefit 1: Archiving increases operational efficiency.
A key benefit to archiving is to keep the production environment lean. You will want an archiving solution that can provide a phased approach. Take an example from email…. After 90 days, you might want to remove attachments out of email and replace with a pointer to content stored in the archive – seamlessly available to your users. And then after 2 years you might want to completely remove the content from the production environment completely but still have it searchable in the archive.
Other considerations would be how the archive itself is managed – single instancing and compression will help to manage the storage footprint.
Benefit 2: Archiving improves end user productivity.
When it comes to users, simple is better. So here, an intuitive, easy to use search interface is important. Search functionality should include date-based or other metadata searches as well as keywords and other more complex searches. You’ll also want to allow users to restore files as a result of an archive search.
Now, we can also discuss more sophisticated legal search and holds. Your archive can have dual benefit – for business productivity but also to securely hold content that is subject to any type of audit, investigation, etc. So you should look at how easy it is to execute both user and legal search/hold.
Benefit 3: Archiving consistently manages retention policies.
Automation is the name of the game here. You will want an archive that can execute as simple or complex rules to collect, store, retain and ultimately dispose of content that meets your corporate policies and/or comply with regulatory obligations. Your archiving solution should give you the ability to treat all content the same or to allow for different policies by different groups/users and/or different content types.
It probably is worth saying that an archiving solution should support multiple content types. There are lots of solutions out there that specialize in one content archiving type but an integrated content archiving approach managed by a unified platform eliminates even more silos in your IT environment. LB
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