Could you guess as to what might be one of the greatest challenges for growing data centers – especially regarding the hardware and infrastructure challenges? According to a Gartner survey, data growth is the single biggest challenge growing businesses face. Other challenges include scalability, performance, network congestion and connectivity. In the same survey, more than 62% of the responding companies choose to consider data archiving as their preferred solution to address data growth, storage and management.
With that said, none of these solutions come cheap, do they? That’s where the “Cloud” begins to take importance. Archiving is now more about regulatory compliance than efficiency in storage – although this payoff is welcome. The 2006 amendments to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) now makes data archiving (more so for email archiving) a mandated necessity. Not doing so leads to legal sanctions, unwarranted litigation and many other problems that no growing business wants.
Today, no data is ever thrown away. Online digital content, proprietary data and critical business data is all moved to the archives. Cloud archiving takes it all one notch up and allows for a practical alternative (especially for small & medium businesses).
Businesses welcome the need for protection for their data; minimizing liability; have an easy way to store, archive and manage data; make content available for distribution; and enable faster movement of content across network. Cloud-based data archiving provides for all of that and much more. More so, it’s also a viable alternative thanks to its upfront, pay-as-you-go costs. Vendors worry about the infrastructure and expertise needed to archive data and that’s why it’s a great alternative for small businesses.
Cloud archiving, however, is not free from downsides. First, companies need to do adequate amount of research and know the right questions to ask. Second, companies will need to specify who has access to the data. Third, businesses considering cloud archiving must have robust policies for data migration, storage and management. Finally, businesses should know all about their vendors – such as their security levels for data, methodology or technology in use, etc.
Simply put, you don’t invest in any hardware and your data remains safe. Also, these solutions are perfect for small and medium businesses – especially for an ever growing need for email archiving on the cloud (along with other data).
Did you take to cloud archiving yet?
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