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The Case to Archive Data
Oftentimes when companies are in a heavily-regulated industry, the threat of not being in compliance can result in overprotection of information. Rather than risk not having access to it, many organizations hoard information, often forever, in their production system.
Storing information in a primary production system can be very expensive – why use nearly all of your available storage to house information that may need to be accessed only in the event of an audit or infrequent report?
Alternatively, archiving information uses a pre-determined set of business requirements to move certain data and/or documents from old or legacy systems to a much cheaper storage option that is still secure and allows for easy access in the event information is needed.
When Do I Need to Archive Data?
There are a number of scenarios where a company may seek out data archiving software:
- Older systems are being decommissioned, resulting in information needing to be migrated into a new system. This may happen during or after a new software purchase or during a merger/acquisition.
- During new system or cloud enablement, many organizations seek to archive information so as not to overload premium storage with inactive information.
- The current production system is responsible for storing too much information, resulting in poor performance.
Alleviating your current or new systems of excessive information can help improve the performance – sometimes drastically – of your production system. Without the stress of extra terabytes of legacy or/and excess information, systems run quicker, crash less, perform updates faster and have more available storage.
Archiving should be performed with every migration project and for any company looking for easier cloud enablement. Why clutter your new system with unneeded legacy data? Why pay premium prices to store information you may never need to access?
Migrate vs. Delete vs. Archive Data
Again, this is where compliance and regulation causes us all to hold tight to our information and keep it at-the-ready just in case it’s needed for an audit. Audits are a real concern – if, for example, the FDA needs a certain document for a service you haven’t offered in years, you need to be able to produce that document quickly.
Because of this, many don’t want to risk moving information off their primary system and they certainly don’t want to risk deleting it. Unfortunately, keeping records for longer than their standard retention period can be a liability for the organization.
When you archive data using data archiving software, the information is copied, moved and then deleted from your system. You can still easily and readily access your information without the clutter of storing it on your system and without the liability of keeping information past its retention period. Archiving provides a win-win scenario.
Accomplish Your Archiving Goals
Want to learn more about managing and archiving information in TrackWise using an easy-to-use software?
The right data archiving software can help determine which information in your system is inactive and, using established requirements, will copy and move archived information to an alternative storage location and then delete it from your system. With the amount of intricacies in software like this, when you look for data archiving software it’s best to also look for a company with years of archival and migration experience within your industry.
To read more about archiving information in TrackWise, download this free PDF and see how data archiving software can help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nagesh Sarma, Managing Director
Nagesh Sarma is the cofounder and managing director at Valiance Partners, Inc, and acts as the special partner liaison to Sparta. Nagesh leads Valiance’s product development team which is responsible for creating specialized solutions for TrackWise and other Sparta platforms. Since Valiance became a Sparta Systems partner in 2009, Nagesh has managed over 60 TrackWise migrations, consolidations, archiving and divestures. He has nearly 30 years of experience in management, software development, large-scale system integration and data migration.
