There are many reasons to archive data, but mostly it comes down to aligning data preservation with other company goals such as keeping cost structures low and system performance high.
While there are a variety of ways to archive older, unused data some are better than others.
Document archiving solutions offering seamless data access and central policy management which requires no end-user downloads are among the top considerations for most companies.
It’s a vital records management process that can protect your company from falling out of favor with regulatory compliance industry bodies and can back up your crucial business data for added protection should the worst case scenario happen.
Think of the old days, before the data we produced was kept in a digital format.
You literally had physical warehouses full of paper records as your data archives.
Records management was tedious and time-consuming, and had a negative effect on employee productivity.
We don’t use paper documents anymore, but some companies still archive data in an inefficient and expensive way.
Modern data archiving has changed all that. Your document archiving solution or data archiving solution should save time, money, and storage space.
Archived data should be easy to access at all times. When you archive documents, data management should become safer, simpler and cheaper in every way. Still not convinced?
Here are 7 reasons why archiving is important:
- Data Security & Compliance
- Data Consolidation
- Data Access
- Data Storage Costs
- Data Management
- Data Visualization
- Data Backup Optimization
Data Security & Compliance
Keeping old or unused data on high-traffic servers, even with the proper access controls in place, increases your attack surface.
By securing compressed data older than a year on a separate storage tier or device, for example, you’re reducing your company’s risk while maintaining the integrity of all that data for as long as you like.
Think of it as secure records management.
Data Consolidation
With so much data across your company’s devices – which keeps growing exponentially by the day – you need a way to consolidate this data. De-duplicating and stubbing files is just the beginning!
Some file archiving software even lets you compress these files further, reducing your digital footprint that much more! If that’s not a reason to archive your company’s data, what is?
Data Access
Accessing data from file archives has historically been a pain.
But gone are the days of involving system admins to pull archived paper files from a dark storage unit.
Now, there are solutions on the market which provide completely seamless access to end users. In just the click of a button, files are archived and stubbed and they’re none the wiser! Productivity is maintained as users experience zero impact.
You wouldn’t run your business using paper documents anymore, so why use a data system for archiving documents?
It meets all of the requirements data protection authorities have set, without impeding employee productivity, because it’s easier to find and retrieve data.
Data Storage Costs
This one is probably the most obvious. Your company pays to store data, period.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or the type of data you are storing, it costs money to maintain that data whether on a server or the cloud.
The biggest benefit to securely archiving documents and data is the financial piece of it.
When you use an archiving system to store historical data, costs can be reduced as much as 50% depending on your volume of data.
That can present significant long-term savings to be used on product development or other areas.
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Data Management
Managing your data becomes exponentially more difficult as data volumes increase.
We’re creating more data than ever before, and general data protection regulation is becoming more stringent by the day.
By storing documents and archiving your data that isn’t used or very infrequently accessed, you make data management that much easier ongoing.
Not to mention the ease of use of those data archiving solutions which centralize data management and automate policy management for even more efficient data management processes.
If you use a reliable offsite archiving system, you can retrieve specific records at any time in a flash.
Data Visualization
The best data archiving solutions allow you to visualize your data to formulate better data management plans.
This means understanding not only how old your data is but also what kind of data you have, how often archived files or locally stored data is accessed, and other pieces of critical information that help you create good data archiving policies in the first place.
Data Backup Optimization
Data backups can be long and cumbersome, but when you archive your company’s electronic documents and data in a secure repository it doesn’t have to be that way.
In fact, most companies with a data archiving system see a dramatic improvement to data backup times, and some even turn to file archiving for that reason in the first place.
Select file archiving companies take this process one step further and eliminate the need for data backups all together by offering data replication.
This is even more efficient and often more cost-effective as well.
