Top 5 Data Archiving Challenges and Solutions
With the recent changes in the business landscape, companies are witnessing an era of data explosion. This has created a challenge for enterprises to manage and maintain hosts of systems producing diverse sets of data on daily basis. 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business.
Another disadvantage of operating in a volumetric data environment is that it consumes a lot of time to back up the information and reinstate it. Moreover, the databases are only expanding with every new functionality introduced and versions updated. This is why organizations are adopting a data archival strategy.
Data archiving helps enterprises to meet the compliance regulations, retain historical data, backup and restore resources, secure them, etc. As a data-focused company, iLink Digital offers Data Archival solutions that help businesses to create a robust data backup and protection strategy. Our solution significantly streamlines the data management tasks while minimizing cost and simplifying compliance.
Through this article, we aim to cover the basic understanding of data archival, the challenges it brings, and the solutions that can help you overcome them.
What is Data Archiving?
Data archiving means removing unnecessary information from your system and moving it into long-term storage. Such kind of data may not be required actively but is useful and can be brought back to service at any time.
Data archiving optimizes resources, speeds up their response time, and moves them for best performance within applicable regulations and the law. Basically, it transforms your systems into a more productive environment. It uses automated software to move the cold data as per the policies set by an administrator. But once the file is archived, the system protects its integrity.
Benefits of Data Archiving
The primary advantage of data archiving is to ensure that the production systems use fewer resources, run more efficiently, and reduce overall storage costs. More specifically, the advantages are –
- Increased Storage Capacity – Since the archived files are much smaller than the original ones, it frees up the space to store more data. The copies of these files are also smaller, hence restoring them takes considerably less amount of time.
- Easier and Faster back-up – Archiving data ensures easier backup and faster recovery rate. As it ensures a simpler backup process and you don’t waste time backing up inactive data.
- Increased Security – Archiving removes the data and eliminates the restoration of unnecessary files, reducing the chances of cyberattacks or data breaches. It forbids any modification in data, preventing data loss.
- Reduced Costs – Archived data is stored on low performance, higher capacity media. Hence requires low maintenance and operation costs reducing time for back-up, upgrades, and database tuning.
Using a virtual data archiving system allows for savings on investments into office intranets and other costly infrastructure. A scalable, cost-effective cloud data archiving solution allows for a pay-as-you-go growth mode, even in industries that generate high amounts of data.
- Enhanced productivity – Organizations have to spend less time maintaining software and infrastructure for onsite backup storage.
- Improved regulatory compliance – Regardless of your industry or vertical, data archiving best practices ensure your organization stays in compliance with applicable regulations and the law.
Challenges of Data Archiving & Solutions
Managing data and making sense out of it comes with its own set of challenges. As an enterprise is looking to improve its data management, it must look for a data archive solution that overcomes the following challenges.
- Growing volume of data
Since the production of operational data within an organization is accelerating, it is becoming difficult to keep track of all the data sources, manage their storage, and ultimately use it. Archiving data makes it easier to scale data and manage the copious amount without wasting administrative time.
- Legal Compliance
Compliance regulations are constantly evolving and becoming more stringent. Enterprises following data archiving strategies can easily comply with a variety of regulations. This takes significantly less amount of time for administrators to conduct legal inquires and compliance reporting. They can stay updated about the changes and review data to identify any modifications in requirements.
- Data Security
Data held in archives need to be protected from loss, corruption, breaches, and thefts. Data archiving solutions moves data to secure location enabling long term retention and storage. It provides secure locations for storing important information and retrieve it back for use as needed.
- Accessibility
A variety of users in the organizations might need to access the archived data. With the data archiving solution organizations can allow access with role-based permissions. Thus teams could easily search and use the data without any assistance from the IT team.
- Increased Budget
69% of the data stored has no value to the company. By that math, the amount of money companies are spending on data storage is probably more than required. Especially for the organizations operating under unstructured data which is typically text-heavy and not organized in any predefined way.
Data archiving reduces the cost of storage by archiving only essential data and eliminating the ones that are no longer need to be retained. This means there’s less primary data to backup, less use of hardware, software, energy, and data center costs as well.
Plan your Data Archival strategy with iLink
iLink Digital has been a continuous recipient of Microsoft Partner awards. Our Data team has recently won the 2021 Microsoft US (MSUS) Partner Award in Power BI. We have been helping enterprises of all sizes to choose the right data archiving strategy considering their business and IT needs.
Get in touch with us to learn more.
Endnotes
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rkulkarni/2019/02/07/big-data-goes-big/?sh=30f168b220d7
