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Information Archiving – Economics and Compliance
The most complete analysis of Information Archiving regarding economics and compliance published to date.
 Information archiving is about moving data from primary storage to another media that is protected and that requires less ongoing expense for storage. When information is moved from primary storage to removable archive media, the primary storage capacity is reclaimed and the backup process is reduced by the amount of data that was moved. Backup is about making copies of data usually on disk storage systems where there is some degree of risk of the data being lost due to device failures or inadvertent or malicious changing or deleting of the data. The backups are done on a regular basis with a certain number of copies maintained in a rotation.
Effective archiving systems provide the data in the context of the application that uses the data or that moves the data to the backup device. This means that the data is usable by the required application without any intervening software encapsulation of the data. Backup software typically encapsulates the data in some format specific to the backup software and for the data to be recovered, the backup software must be used to “unwrap” and access the data. Transitions with backup software, either to another vendor or to a different generation, become a major issue when considering recovery of data that has been archived for a long period of time.
 Archiving is about preserving information that is not usually required immediately and may not ever be needed for access but must be retained. There are business rules for companies around how the data is preserved and there are regulatory compliance laws around some of the data. The compliance laws are more stringent in certain industries. All companies are subject to discovery regulations regarding access to information in case of civil or criminal proceedings and all data, regardless of where it is stored, is subject to discovery as dictated by FRCP, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
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