Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model by Marc Farley

Author:Marc Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: COMPUTERS / Educational Software
ISBN: 9780735679467
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Published: 2013-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Digital archiving and electronic discovery

There are two different use cases for digital archiving. The first is to create a repository of data that has intrinsic value and that people are interested in accessing. Libraries are excellent examples of archiving repositories that contain all sorts of information, including research data or documents that students and scientists may need to reference as part of their work. This form of digital archiving has become one of the most important elements of library science, with specialized requirements for very long-term data storage (think millenniums) and methods which are beyond the scope of this book.

The other use case for digital archiving is for business purposes and is the subject of this chapter. Digital archiving in the business context is one of the most challenging management practices in all of IT because it attempts to apply legal and compliance requirements over a large and growing amount of unstructured data. Decisions have to be made about what data to archive, how long to keep the data that is archived, how to dispose of archived data that is no longer needed, what performance or access goals are needed, and where and how to store it all.

Like disaster recovery (DR), archiving for legal and compliance purposes is a cost without revenue potential. For that reason, companies tend to limit their expenditures on archiving technology without hindering their ability to produce documents when asked for them. There are other reasons to archive business data but, in general, business archiving is closely tied to compliance and legal agendas.

The ability to find and access archived data tends to be a big problem. Storing dormant data safely, securely, and affordably for long periods of time is at odds with being able to quickly find specific files and records that are pertinent to unanticipated future queries. The selection of the storage technology used to store archived data has big implications for the long-term cost of archiving and the service levels the IT team will be able to provide.

Compliance and legal requirements have driven the development of electronic discovery (eDiscovery) software that is used to quickly search for data that may be relevant to an inquiry or case. Courts expect organizations to comply with orders to produce documents and have not shown much tolerance for technology-related delays. Due to the costs incurred in court cases, eDiscovery search and retrieval requirements are often given higher priority than storage management requirements. In other words, despite the desire to limit the costs of archiving, in some businesses, the cost of archival storage is relatively high, especially when one considers that the best case scenario is one where archived data is never accessed again.

Complete archiving solutions often combine long-term, archival storage with eDiscovery software, but there is a great deal of variation in the ways archiving is implemented. Many companies shun eDiscovery software because they can’t find a solution that fits their needs or they don’t want to pay for it. Unlike backup, where best practices are fairly common

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