Data Archiving Strategy

Create a Successful Data Archiving Strategy

With massive amounts of data being generated day in, day out, organizations require significant amounts of storage. However, as data accumulates, much of it is not necessary for day-to-day business purposes. Yet, you can't exactly delete it due to both business and legal concerns. That's where data archiving comes in.

Why Archive Your Data?

There are many reasons to archive data. For example, high performance solid state drives allow you to access frequently used information much faster than traditional storage devices. However, these solid state drives do not have nearly as much capacity as their hard disk drive counterparts. Thus, moving files that are no longer needed on a routine basis off of these drives frees up space for current data and reduces costs. As a side benefit, moving information off of primary storage can also lead to performance improvements.While reducing costs per gigabyte stored and improving performance are compelling reasons to archive data, legal compliance is another. Whether your company is subject to a specific data retention regulation or has concerns about legal liability, archiving data for a prescribed time period can help you to comply with regulations or respond to legal requests.Another reason to archive data is to improve information backups. Each day, your company generates new data, all of which must be backed up. Soon, your information backup set may be far too large to back up efficiently. Meanwhile, data that should be archived isn't changing, yet each day it is being backed up. By archiving this data, you can reduce the size of your backups (and thus, reduce backup costs).Creating a Data Archive StrategyAccording to Dolphin, data archiving should support a comprehensive Information Lifecycle Management strategy. In order to effectively archive your data, you need to understand your data's lifecycle. At a minimum, you will need to understand the following:

Any legal obligations or regulations that affect your data

Which data should be retained

How long information should be archived

At which point data can be safely destroyed

How data should be destroyed at the end of its lifecycle

Different types of data have different information retention periods that may or may not be determined by state or federal regulations (Source: "Company Records: What Should You Keep... and for How Long", HR Training Center). For example, human resources data retention requirements vary by state and data type. You may be required to keep some files such as earnings and employee service records indefinitely. On the other hand, daily time reports, disability and sick benefits, and attendance records can usually be discarded after four or five years.As far as legal compliance goes, you'll definitely want to comply with any applicable regulations, but you may not want to keep record beyond the mandated time period. Why? Doing so could mean that the information is subject to legal discovery, an unnecessary risk. For any data subject to legal requirements or liability, work with corporate counsel to ensure that the data is archived and later destroyed appropriately.Data archiving removes infrequently accessed data off of primary storage systems and onto high capacity, low-cost storage. This frees up the company's high performance, and typically more expensive, primary storage systems while allowing the company to retain the information for as long as it deems necessary at a much lower cost. Meanwhile, should there be a need to access an archived file, that data is readily accessible from the archive.