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56 ARCHIVING
ARCHIVING IN
A PERVASIVE
COMPUTING WORLD
Steve Tongish looks at how archiving is changing in the all pervading world
of IT, and what factors concerning long-term retention of data
organisations need to consider when choosing an archiving system
Words: By Steve Tongish, Marketing Director EMEA, Plasmon
Since the earliest commercial activity, records of organisations that do not take archiving seriously. In the near
transactions and processes have needed to be kept. By future, CEOs may open the draws of their company’s digital
logging information onto paper ledgers, our predecessors filing cabinets and find that they are empty.
were able to maintain and develop their businesses. However, Before further vital information is inappropriately stored or
in the late 20th Century, computers were introduced to lost, organisations need to assess what information they
process and record commercial activity, it became clear that need to preserve, how long they realistically need to keep it
organisations would soon need more than just paper-based and what means they can employ to avoid unexpected losses.
business archives. As a result, technologies to preserve
digital information were introduced. The majority of Planning choices for a successful archive
businesses in the developed world have now made major A key point to appreciate before addressing data archiving
progress in digitising their businesses. But just because a requirements is the difference between backup and archiving.
digital archive has been deployed, isn’t to say that all data is Backup is a short-term solution that enables a business to
being managed with an appropriate level of discipline. continue functioning should there be a disaster. It provides an
In the early period of digitisation only records that were up to date copy of a system or data so that it can be
analogous to simple paper documents (invoices, receipts, recovered to the state it was in when the disaster occurred.
salary payments and letters) were handled by IT systems. Archiving, on the other hand, means that data, which is
Nowadays, businesses need to consider how to successfully current today, will be preserved as it is for use multiple years
record and archive far more than these basics. All business into the future. An archive provides the ability to find and
information can be, and is, recorded and communicated access older data as and when required.
digitally and the number of potentially useful digital To compare these two disciplines you can say that a backup
technologies is expanding, seemingly, exponentially. provides system “recovery” and an archive provides
Email, VoIP and instant messenger systems are used to information “discovery”. This is a critical distinction to the
share and sometimes store critical information. This data operation of the business that not all companies understand.
may not actually reside in company operated database and file The immediate availability of infrequently accessed, five year
servers. Vital records may be held in quasi-public old data will not be much help in recovering a production IT
environments such as hosted wikis or third-party messaging environment after a disaster. A perfect backup of today’s
systems, including those of mobile phone operators. data that will become corrupt, lost or deleted in a few weeks
Information may also escape the company’s perimeter by is, in turn, no use as an archive.
residing with third-party contractors and key suppliers. The As organisations look at their data they will be able to
type of file types being stored is also growing. It’s no longer identify clear patterns of use from creation through disposal.
just Microsoft Office documents that a typical business This can be termed the information life cycle and different
department needs to worry about, how about .xml, .rss, mp3, types of data often have different lifecycles. For example,
or .gp3? There is a legal and operational storm coming for financial data is generally required to be stored for a period of
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