Data archiving is a concept used by many businesses, across all sectors and industries. The ability to store data but then later retrieve it again is crucial. Many aspects need to be taken into consideration when planning to archive your data and compliances need to be met. For the benefit of the business you need to make sure that you archive your data in an organised fashion.
First and foremost, consider your business requirements
Dependent on the business you work for and the specific storage needs of the company, this will then determine your Data Archiving requirements. To elaborate: if your businesses is very client based and on a regular basis you converse, these e-mails, in the long-term need to be saved. As a solution I present email archiving as the solution. A standard e-mail provider, while it can act as a form of short-term storage, needs to allow files to be accessible at a later date.
Archiving in this sense enables increased levels of local primary Cloud storage for those documents that need to be retrieved more promptly. An added benefit I must share; by archiving old e-mails and PST files found in the exchange, in turn it enables higher speeds and retrieval rates.
Do you have any legal obligations when data archiving?
When it comes to legal obligations, as a result of archiving all e-mails, this instantly complies with corporate governance and standards. Sounds too easy right? Meeting legal requirements is one of the most important parts of storing data. As a business we also recommend that you establish clear and recorded defensible retention policies. This should include schedules, interval data archiving and suitable training for those personnel involved.
Who is responsible for protecting your data?
Those individuals whom are responsible within your business for data protection and storage need to be made aware and trained in relation to data retrieval but also for a worst-case scenario e.g. disaster recovery.
In relation to other employees, those indirectly associated with using data storage. The retrieval process is nothing but simple. A data archiving service allows you to create an automatic policy that in turn archives e-mails, which haven’t been accessed for a specifically set period of time. In order to then access these again, all the employee has to do is simply click on a ‘docket’ to then recover the file. I must also add that this process requires no additional IT support or involvement. It’s that seamless for the user.
How accessible is your solution?
All files need to be organised in a way, which will enable easily accessible files. Dating files is a great way to start this process off. By dating a certain type of document when you come to later retrieve this file it makes the searching process both more time and cost efficient.
Another way to improve your accessibility would be to store your data system wide and also in multiple geographical locations where possible. As a result this makes the data stored more reliable. If disaster were to occur, due to this precaution, you have increased your chances of successful data recovery.
Need a hand with your archiving solution? No problem, contact us to find out how we can help.
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September 15th, 2016
