When managing data, archiving is often misunderstood as a mere storage function. In reality, data archiving is a more strategic process that plays a key role in improving system performance and ensuring compliance. An effective archiving strategy will also reduce your risk of major data loss and help keep storage costs in check.
So, what is data archiving, and how does it fit into your long-term data management strategy? Here’s everything you need to know.
What Is Data Archiving?
Data archiving involves moving information you are no longer actively using to a storage solution designed specifically for long-term preservation. Archived data repositories often include historical information or records you don’t need to access or use frequently.
It’s important to note that data archiving serves a different purpose than data backup. Data backup is primarily a disaster recovery solution that creates copies of active data to prevent data loss following events like:
- Disasters
- Accidental deletions
- Cyberattacks
- System failures
You can use your backup storage systems to quickly restore information to its previous state and ensure business continuity. On the other hand, data archiving focuses on moving data to the next stage of its lifecycle. Archiving allows you to retain data that’s rarely used in daily business operations while keeping it accessible when needed.
Why Data Archiving Is Important
Data archiving allows you to optimize your long-term storage strategy and offers a range of other advantages. The benefits of data archiving include:
- Improve System Performance: By moving inactive data out of the primary environment, you can reduce the load on production systems and improve system performance.
- Ensure Compliance With Regulations: Archiving promotes regulatory compliance by allowing you to retain data for specified periods by state or federal law.
- Promote Cost-Effective Data Storage: Archiving large volumes of data can yield significant cost savings on storage and overage costs.
- Reduce Your Risk Surface: Archiving records and attachments minimizes the amount of information at risk during a data loss or corruption event.
- Enhance Data Governance: Archiving supports organized data management and enables you to ensure data is properly stored during its lifecycle.
If you never archive obsolete data, your production org may become overrun with sensitive information you don’t need to support daily operations. All of that clutter can weaken data security posture and make it more challenging to promote operational efficiency.
By removing that clutter through archiving, you can avoid the challenges associated with unstructured data and ensure compliance with retention requirements.
Types of Data to Archive
Data archiving is essential for managing different types of information.
Emails are something you may want to consider archiving. You might be required to archive emails for legal reasons, especially if you operate in a sector like healthcare or finance. You can use email archives to demonstrate compliance with regulations such as HIPAA or GDPR.
You should also archive large datasets like analytics logs or research data. Archiving this information can free up storage space while keeping those details accessible when needed. In addition, you can archive older or dormant data, like closed customer accounts or completed projects, to reduce system clutter and enhance performance.
Additionally, any entity that deals with large volumes of regulated information can benefit from archiving. For example, the healthcare sector can archive patient records to meet record-keeping requirements without slowing down active systems. In financial services, archiving ensures compliance with regulations on data retention while protecting sensitive customer information.
These are just a few instances where archiving can reduce the strain on storage mediums while safeguarding critical information for future use.
The Data Archiving Process
The archiving process includes three essential steps:
Step 1: Assessment and Planning
The first step in data archiving involves thoroughly assessing your organization’s data needs and storage requirements. Start by analyzing what information your team uses daily and identify what can be moved to an archive without impacting normal operations.
Make sure to identify any information that is subject to special regulatory requirements. For example, if you operate in the healthcare space, you need to differentiate protected health information (PHI) from other types of data.
In addition to date identification, establishing a data retention policy is crucial in this phase. Such a policy specifies how long you have to store different types of information and when you can delete it.
Holding onto critical data long enough for compliance purposes is important, but you shouldn’t necessarily store it forever. With these guidelines in place, you can approach data archiving systematically.
Step 2: Selection of Archiving Solutions
Once you’ve mapped out your data needs and created clear retention policies, choose a data archiving solution that aligns with your organization’s information management goals. There are plenty of solutions out there that are primarily divided into two categories: on-premises and cloud-based.
On-premises solutions involve maintaining physical servers or storage systems within your facilities. You will enjoy maximum control over your data, as everything remains onsite and within direct oversight of your IT team.
You can customize these solutions to meet your specific security requirements, making them ideal if you are subject to stringent regulatory frameworks. However, setting them up can be expensive and labor-intensive.
Cloud-based solutions provide you with superior flexibility and scalability. You can expand storage as your needs grow without significant upfront investments or any major reworking. Your service provider will handle all the logistical challenges associated with scaling up your storage resources, allowing your team to focus on the day-to-day.
Many cloud solutions have built-in compliance features, data encryption, and remote access capabilities. As such, they are highly convenient if you plan to scale or are concerned about bogging down your IT team. Cloud-based solutions can be more cost-effective as well. They are typically subscription-based, meaning you pay for what you use.
When selecting an archiving solution, consider the following factors:
- Scalability
- Cost
- Accessibility
- Security
Scalability ensures that the solution can grow with your data storage needs. You should also consider the cost of implementing, maintaining, and using the solution. Cloud-based platforms are always more cost-effective and require a lower upfront investment. Additionally, cloud-based solutions offer remote accessibility, which can be valuable if you manage a remote or decentralized team.
Step 3: Implementation and Migration
The final step in your data archiving journey involves implementation and migration. Migration entails transferring the inactive data you identified from primary storage environments to the archive.
You must carefully plan and execute this phase of the process to ensure that the data is migrated accurately and securely. You must perform the migration in stages to minimize disruptions to your operations.
During the migration, systematically test and validate information to verify that the data has been transferred correctly. As part of this process, you’ll need to ensure the information can be accessed and recalled.
Automated migration tools can streamline the rollout and implementation process. These solutions can automate everything from data cleaning to testing, alerting your team to any potential issues.
After you’ve completed the migration, you and your team should perform a post-migration audit. Use this opportunity to identify any issues with the archived data’s structure, organization, and accessibility. Discuss what went well, resolve any problems that you’ve discovered, and refine your archiving policy to support sustainability.
Best Practices for Data Archiving
In addition to following the steps outlined above, you’ll need to adopt some established best practices, such as the following:
Establish a Data Retention Policy
A robust data retention policy lays the foundation for an effective data archiving process. Your policy needs to provide clear guidelines on what gets archived, how long to retain it, and when or if it can be deleted. Ensure that your policy also aligns with any relevant state or federal laws and regulatory frameworks.
A well-written policy will prevent unnecessary storage of outdated or irrelevant data. It will help you optimize your storage costs and reduce security risks. Some of the variables you need to address in your policy include:
- How long each type of information should be kept
- Who can access the archives
- Any industry-specific standards that apply
Setting up these guidelines allows you to align your data archiving practices with regulatory requirements and support operational continuity.
Regularly Review Archived Data
Just because you’ve put data in an archive doesn’t mean you can forget it exists. You must periodically review the information you’ve stowed away for relevance and accuracy. Data that was once necessary may no longer be useful or required, meaning it can be cleansed from your archives.
Regularly reviewing archived data allows you to free up storage space and reduce security vulnerabilities. During these reviews, you should also update your archiving practices based on changing organizational needs. Focus on improving data accessibility and retrieval efficiency. Consider how you can maximize your cost savings and stay audit-ready.
Ensure Security and Compliance
Security and compliance are paramount when handling archived data. Implement security measures such as encryption, which protects information against unauthorized access, and access controls that limit who can retrieve information in your archives. You’ll also need to address any relevant compliance frameworks that apply to your industry.
A reputable solutions provider will help strengthen your security posture by providing native security tools such as encryption, firewalls, and monitoring. Find out what each prospective provider does to keep your data out of the wrong hands so you can find the ideal partner to support business continuity.
How Can Own Help With Data Archiving?
Own Archive makes it easy to relocate dormant data from production environments, preventing overage costs, improving performance, and ensuring compliance. Typical archiving solutions can make it difficult to view and retrieve archived information, but Own Archive allows you to view archived records directly in Salesforce through a front-end widget. This way, even though the data is removed from your production org, you can still view or unarchive records directly from Salesforce. With Archive, you can also quickly restore records to production with parent and child relationships intact.
Schedule a demo to learn more.
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