Where Did Archiving Come From?
During the past 10 years, we've seen organizations gradually deploy solutions to move data from primary applications, file systems and document repositories to secondary tiers to free up much needed storage space, reduce ongoing storage costs and improve application/infrastructure efficiency. When this process involved simple data move decisions it went by the name of hierarchical storage management (HSM). This paradigm quickly evolved to include requirements for retention and seamless end-user access to retained information. Archiving was born!
You can look back over the last 7-8 years in particular and see how archiving has risen meteorically through requirements covering compliance, records retention and cost reduction strategies to become one of the hottest IT requirements today.
The trouble is as more data is archived, the burden of risk shifts from retaining information to accessing information; after all why keep information if you can't access it? In response, archiving technologies adopted content search to turn the ever growing repositories of retained information into corporate accessible information assets. At this time, the use cases for search largely came from the end-user wanting to access their data that was being archived. Again, it wasn't long before this requirement was enveloped by corporate searches across the enterprise and later workflows associated with supervising records for compliance as well as facilitating discovery for litigation.
There is a problem though...archives are fundamentally only as good as the data that is placed inside them. In other words, if they don't contain everything your organization needs or, indeed, the specific records that need to be retained, then the risk isn't being managed. What use is a search capability that doesn't search everything that you need? Further, how useful is it when the same search capability requires you to archive or copy more duplicated data in order to get the search function to search everything? Isn't that a Catch 22? There has to be a better way.
If you are interested in reading the entire white paper, please make sure you provide a valid e-mail address below. All fields marked with an asterik (*) are required.