Data archiving is a big part of many different business models, regardless of industry. If your business deals with a substantial amount of data, investing in the right data archival solutions could significantly benefit your organization.
But what exactly is data archival and why does it matter? If you want to know what does it mean to archive data and how cloud data archiving services could benefit your business, you’re in luck. We put together a guide to data archiving and all of the benefits of outsourcing your data archiving needs. Let’s start by breaking down exactly what data archiving is.
What is Data Archiving Services?
Are you wondering: what does archive data mean? Data archiving is a process that involves identifying information that is not usable or active and moving that data out of the active system into a storage system. Data archiving is very different from data deletion. Rather than destroying data that is no longer relevant, IT specialists will move obsolete or irrelevant data to a storage system to archive it. At any point, archived data can be easily transferred back into the main system if needed.
Having a good strategy for data archival can help an organization optimize its systems by allocating resources and data to the right places. An outsourcing company that deals in data archival will set up a portal that employees can use to access data on the main system and in storage with a quick search. To put it simply, data archival is massively beneficial to businesses that need to optimize their storage capabilities or deal with massive volumes of data on a regular basis.
Why Are These Services Necessary?
There are a number of reasons why a business or organization may want to do this. If a company deals with sensitive customer data, it’s important to store that data in a place with excellent security. Just as well, data from old business processes could be beneficial in the future. To delete this data would be a waste, so storing it away so it can be used in the future can be a smart move. Just as well, keeping all of a business’s data, even old or obsolete data, could prove useful in the future in the case of legal trouble.
Long-term data archiving, which involves saving data for years or decades, could also be an investment instead of just a precaution. Third-party organizations are always looking for market or customer data to access for marketing purposes. Businesses could make passive income by selling data (legally, of course) that has been archived long-term.
The Benefits of Data Archiving Support
There are so many different benefits to these services. These benefits include:
- The backup process becomes streamlined. By investing in data archiving processes or services, you can make your data backup processes much more simple because you aren’t pouring time into backing up obsolete or inactive information. It’s already been stored in your chosen storage system.
- Meet compliance needs with more efficiency. Most businesses in most industries will have to deal with regulatory compliance in some capacity. Some businesses deal with even more intensive regulatory compliance needs, especially in the medical and healthcare industries. Investing in excellent data archiving processes and strategies can help your organization stay compliant and secure sensitive information.
- Your organization’s productivity could increase. This is a lesser-known benefit of data archiving. When your teams are spending a lot less time managing and editing data within archaic software, they are able to focus on more important and relevant aspects of their roles. Data archiving software makes it possible to maintain and manage data and infrastructure via storage systems with ease.
- Better and higher capacity. By archiving your data, you’re ensuring that your backup and recovery processes are able to run better and faster.
- Your business will be able to scale more efficiently. By using a cloud-based data archiving service, you won’t have to worry about outgrowing your cloud platform. As your business grows and accumulates more data, a cloud-based archival system can be easily expanded and updated to suit your particular volume of data.
The Differences between Archiving and Backup
Data backup and data archival may seem like the same thing, but they are actually quite different and each have their own use cases. They aren’t mutually exclusive, either. In fact, most organizations could benefit from having a data backup strategy as well as a data archival strategy.
Data backup involves making a copy of active and current data. This data can include things that are used regularly and are changed often. This data is automatically copied on a regular basis after each and every change, and saved onto a storage platform.
Data archival is the movement of data from an active system to a storage system. There’s not really any copying going on-- the data is simply being migrated somewhere else. Data that is archived is almost always data that is no longer actively used or changed but may still be useful in the future and thus should not be deleted. This data is kept safe in a storage system, much like data that is copied and backed up.
Both data backup and data archiving are beneficial processes to have in place if your organization deals with a lot of data. Both of these processes are security measures. Try to think of data backup as a security measure in the event of a system breach or failure, which data archival is a security measure in case of legal issues or the need for old data.
If you have any questions surrounding data archiving services contact the team at AOP today!
