The Digital Archiving Practice in the Enterprise Information Management Solutions Division is in charge of helping organizations to draw up archiving policies that could be automated for administration and that are aimed at lowering backup costs, offering long term preservation for digital content, and facilitating offsite storage of digital content for disaster recovery purposes.
Document scanning and indexing are not in themselves activities that constitute digital archiving. The mere storage of electronic documents in a document management system may also not be considered as digital archiving activity either. They all however, can be considered good entry point activities into the realm of digital archiving. Therefore, this particular business domain of ours may not be equated to our ERDMS or Document Imaging Bureau services although both services can be initiated as your company’s entry point into digital archiving.
Digital archiving does not in itself fulfil all the requirements for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) practice. It is not an automatic inclusion for BCDR just because it is being practiced in the company. For the digital archiving activity to be recognized for inclusion in a company’s BCDR efforts, it should be properly enrolled in current formal BCDR framework so that it would become compliant with BCDR plans and practices. It is important to stress this so that our customer does not retire into the common complacency of management believing their company has reliable business continuity and disaster recovery program just because it has implemented certain information management projects that may include digital archiving. All the various information management practices throughout the organization must be formally enrolled in and appraised for qualification into the company’s BCDR program. Without any central coordination of all our information management projects with a focus on BCDR planning and management, the organization would still face the risk of failure following a disaster.
Digital archiving is the long-term retention and management of historical, fixed-content digital assets. The Enterprise Storage Group, ESG, define Archiving as:
“The long-term retention and management of historical digital assets that are no longer actively needed for current business operations, but have been purposefully retained to satisfy regulatory compliance, corporate governance, litigation support, records management or data management requirements.”
Our business Partner, Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (ASTI), further notes that these digital assets contain data that is specifically retained to satisfy industry compliance regulations and corporate governance, in addition to providing litigation support and records management. Often used for legal discovery requests, an effective archive solution can mitigate risks and enable business success. An estimated 60–80% of all corporate data is fixed content. Just think of all of the backups you do on a systematic basis, and how much of the data in those backups never changes. Then think of the time and money you could save if you had a solution that let you back up only the data that requires short-term protection. You could then permanently archive your remaining fixed content data to safe, secure media that is easily and readily accessed. ASTI UDO® (Ultra Density Optical) archive solutions can help you to do just that, and more.
EIMS Solutions
Identity Management Solutions
Electronic Security & Surveillance
Secure Print Solutions
Information Technology Products
Business Management & Consulting"An archive strategy to meet today’s demanding compliance standards is a business imperative. IT executives should strive to separate fixed content data from active production data. Fixed content data should be moved to an active archive. A best practice for securing long-term data archives is to maintain three copies of the data on at least two different types of media in multiple locations, mitigating the risk of media failure. At least one copy of the media should be removable and be maintained offsite for disaster recovery purposes."
If your organization is like most, you are being driven by a number of government regulations mandating varying lengths of record retention, ranging from 7 years to 100 years or even to “forever.” These records and images must be authentic and readily accessible.
Storing data for more than 5 years requires a strategy. Successful strategies need to consider the following:
With our business partner, ASTI Technologies, we help your company to overcome the several obstacles companies could face today with managing data:
Many firms think they are archiving their data, but they are actually performing backups. Backup is a way of restoring data, preventing its loss in the event of a disaster. But backups fall significantly short of meeting the requirements for permanence, authenticity and longevity. Finding and retrieving older documents is nearly impossible with just a backup solution.
Our business partner, ASTI, observes again that, “When you deploy a tiered storage strategy that addresses data according to its use - active data, backup data, and archive data - you’ll be able to improve operational efficiencies, decrease costs, and reduce business risk. No longer will you need to keep your volumes of archived data on expensive disk, or rely on unmanageable and unreliable backup tapes for valuable archive data. You’ll be able to retrieve data quickly and use it to create a competitive advantage, freeing up time and resources to investigate new markets, find new customers and improve your services. By implementing a tiered storage strategy that includes an Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (ASTI) archival storage solution, you can dramatically reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) by lowering your overall storage costs. Use highly redundant disk, with the highest price point, for normal business operations that require high-access, short-term data storage for business-critical data. Back up only active, primary data to tape with your normal backup process for restore and disaster recovery. Develop an effective archive strategy, that includes ASTI UDO® archive solutions, as a best-practice for permanent archiving. It is the archive answer when data cannot be altered, when data must be retained for extended periods of time and when fast access is required for random legal discovery requests”.
The digital archiving solution that we bring to you from ASTI is the only business solution that safeguards the data authenticity, access, longevity and removability that is demanded by new regulations. ASTI solutions are available for small-to mid-size businesses as well as very large companies. And, it’s all at a low Total Cost of Ownership. UDO® provides you with absolute data authenticity for regulatory compliance or other situations where archived data must remain 100% unchanged. UDO® uses a patented Phase Change recording process that permanently alters the physical state of true write-once recording layer material, ensuring data integrity without the risks inherent in “write once, read many (WORM) solutions” that are really just software emulations. UDO® has been designed and proven to deliver a media life of more than 50 years, providing you with excellent return on your storage investment. With the new advances in blue laser technology used in UDO®, you will have more than six times the capacity of previous- generation storage technologies. And you’ll have fast random access capability to facilitate rapid data retrieval for legal discovery requests. In addition, ASTI’s open CIFS/NFS interface, like the interface on any NAS appliance, allows for easy integration with customer applications.
With a tiered storage strategy integrating ASTI archive solutions, you’ll be able to:
Through the implementation of our Digital Archiving solutions your company is guaranteed with receiving offsite copies of all data that is committed to be overseen by our digital archiving systems. The creation of the offsite copy is done automatically and through clearly defined archiving policies for the company.
We can also create for your company microfiche copies of the closed documents. All these archiving techniques would help your company to completely rebuild its document repositories in the event of a disaster.
The unit of storage medium in the recommended secure archival storage is the Ultra Density Optical (UDO) medium that has the following features that meet the strategies outlined above.
Professional Storage
✓ Designed for 24/7 usage
✓ Continuous random access
50 year media life
✓ Secure storage, no need for backups
✓ Reduces data migrations
True WORM Technology
✓ Unalterable storage
✓ Physical, permanent change
Removal robust cartridge
✓ Offsite storage
✓ Low cost disaster recovery
Backwards read compatible for future generations
✓ Protects investment
✓ Low cost upgrade to next generation
Data verification
✓ Automatic check during writing
✓ Failing sectors get reallocated
The options that are available in our optical storage solution suite include simple manual systems, jukebox, or archive appliance.
Archiving practice will yield the following benefits:
By using the permanent archiving solution that we bring to you from ASTI organizations also subscribe to disaster planning and business continuity approach that has been proven to be most reliable in the industry.