Today, organisations are churning out significant amounts of data on a daily basis. Daily back-ups have become "fashionable", yet very few organisations are archiving corporate information assets to preserve them for the long-term - archiving is still considered a "nice to have" option by a fair amount of organisations.
Some organisations initially viewed back-ups and archives as the same or similar technology, since both of these technologies essentially play a vital role in protecting e-mail systems, file server environments and other data collection technologies.
Despite these seeming similarities, a number of differences exist between back-up and archiving. These differences make it extremely important for organisations to develop distinct yet complementary strategies around each discipline, to gain the benefit of the full spectrum of benefits provided by these separate technologies.
These two technologies need to be fused into a single, cohesive data management policy or strategy.
The primary function of back-ups has always been to create copies of data to protect the organisation from data loss - whether the loss is derived from human error, hardware failure, malicious intent or geographic disaster. Back-ups have traditionally always been accommodated on typically very slow and sequential magnetic media or tapes.
Archiving is designed to store all of the data in the organisation. Archives are traditionally accommodated on hard disk technologies, benefiting from the ease of access and relative high speed of retrieval. Archiving also should guarantee the accessibility and integrity of the content throughout its entire life cycle.
Proactive legal discovery is in fact driven by archival solutions, not back-up.
A list detailing the reasons why both messaging and data archival is proposed is provided below:
* Enables electronic discovery
* Regulatory compliance
* Storage management
* Knowledge management
* Retention life cycle management
* Disaster recovery and business continuity
For further information on how your data could potentially benefit from two distinct yet complementary strategies, and a potential storage assessment of your environment, please contact us on the address provided below.
For more information, contact info@ubuntusa.co.za or visit www.ubuntusa.co.za or call Sarel on +2712 347 7944.
Share
Editorial contacts