Separating Backup and Archiving; Securing Your Digital Information

Today's companies are challenged not only with managing rapidly growing volumes of information that are spread across many technologies and geographies, but also with heightened regulatory and legal oversight on their information management – not to mention how to manage all of this amongst tightening IT budgets in a tough economy. Given this complex environment, how do companies ensure that their data can easily be recovered in the event of a disaster, but also quickly accessible and retrievable to satisfy regulation and litigation needs? How do companies determine which records they should destroy, backup, or archive – and how do they manage these storage costs? Does having an efficient backup solution in place effectively meet both these demands?

The short answer is no. Backup solutions alone do not prevent regulatory trouble. In today’s world of increasing record retention regulations and demands for improved corporate governance, backup alone cannot replace the need for a true digital archiving solution. Even though backup solutions meet requirements for duplicate, tamper-free and secure records, they are not sufficient for a fully Compliant Records Management program. Destruction, for example, which is a major component of any records management program – is just not possible to perform on data that has been backed up on numerous backup tapes.

Simply put, backup solutions provide for data protection and recovery, while archiving provides data retention and retrieval, as well as proof of chain-of-custody against every record. While both solutions are part of electronic storage, they address different needs. In today’s world of shrinking backup windows and regulatory requirements, enterprises need to implement both backup and digital archiving for complete digital data protection.

From document management to digital records management – an integrated approach

In the past true digital archiving solutions simply didn’t exist – regulatory and compliance pressures were slim to none with archiving viewed solely as a records management function and the preservation of documents for historical reasons. Moreover, the speed of drop in cost for gigabytes allowed people to ignore storage management and just keep buying more storage as it filled up.

With the onset of heightened compliance and litigation, the huge increase in electronic records, combined with rising storage costs, companies were forced to realize the importance of consistently retaining – and destroying their documents via automated and unbiased policies. Yet how could companies go about doing this? Document management systems tried to step in as digital records management systems – but it didn’t work – IT was missing.

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