Data Archiving and Records Management

Data Archiving & Records Management

Consider the following “simplified” scenario. You own a successful online retail novelty store and you have been in business for 10 years. You purchase your merchandise from one hundred different sources. You have 3,000 very satisfied customers and 10 unsatisfied customers. You make 3 purchases each year from each vendor. Each of your customers makes a purchase twice each year and you get one complaint a year from each of your unsatisfied customers.  Let’s look at the following... 

After 10 years in business:
  • You have 3,000 invoices from your vendors
  • You have 60,000 Sales Orders from your customers
  • You have had 100 complaints from your unsatisfied customers
Why are you paying for 63,000 records to be instantly available to you while over the past 10 years you have only needed to retrieve 100?

Consider you are a company called Viewpointe and you are responsible for the imaging of consumer checks for some of the largest financial institutions in the United States. You are storing over 130 billion checks. Over the 7 years that the checks are required to be kept, at most, only 3% of the checks will ever be requested.  This environment raises (at least) two questions:
  • How do you back up these 130 billion checks every Friday night? (You don’t, you archive)
  • What spinning disk storage media do you use for these checks? (You do and you don’t – You use a hierarchical storage management approach that minimizes the total cost of ownership over the life and access expectations of the data as opposed to the life of the media.)
Almost all of this data becomes JIC data (see the White Paper). Understanding how to leverage data archiving and a good records management program can save your company a lot of time and money. Archiving, using WORM technology (Write Once, Read Many), can also be used to protect important company records from accidental or intentional alteration or destruction. In many cases, archiving using WORM technology is considered best practices for protecting many records for regulatory compliance.

Our company was the original developer of nine (9) patents in data archiving (see our Patents Page) while working for IBM and can help your company put a plan in place to protect your vital company electronic records, or images of your company’s assets. Contact us now to make an appointment to discuss how our archiving techniques can lower your costs and help to protect your company’s data assets.
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