By Erik Raper 1

Enterprises today realize big data is relevant to the way they do business.

Measured in terms of volume, velocity and variety, big data can represent a major disruption in business intelligence and data management, upending fundamental notions about information governance. Because it impacts enterprises in every market and industry, the plight of managing escalating data volume is understandable.

Businesses are simply generating, processing, analyzing, interpreting and storing data on a massive scale.

What to do? Archive at an enterprise level.

Archiving at an enterprise level means that data from all business applications are archived in a consistent way into an enterprise archive solution. An enterprise archiving solution addresses everything from information management to data bloat.

The archive provides a single point of entry for all users who need access to critical data. This imposes stringent requirements for enterprise scalability. As information from tens or hundreds of systems is received periodically by the archiving platform, it must be queued and ingested in accordance with business rules. Once the information has been ingested into the enterprise archive, the platform must ensure that potentially hundreds of billions of records are stored, managed and made easily accessible.

Today, a structured archiving approach allows for enterprise advantages in five key ways.

1. Decommission Legacy Systems

Businesses often fall into the trap of maintaining legacy systems that provide little value to the organization, having been replaced or superseded by newer and more efficient systems. Associated maintenance expenses include licensing, server, environmental and administrative costs. Once sensitive data from these systems is archived, they can be decommissioned—and all costs associated with keeping these relic systems going can evaporate.

2. Long-Term Retention & Preservation Management

Enterprises currently use a variety of tactical archiving solutions, including treating backup as an archive and maintenance legacy applications. These strategies are costly, prevent easy access to information for users and, in the case of backup as an archive, are non-compliant. A single, integrated suite will create efficiencies and will meet both regulatory standards and the requirements of a variety of users.

3. Streamline Application Performance

A few prime reasons for loss of productivity in business today are slow application performance, limited access to inactive data stored across applications and the inability to provide timely information access to users, auditors and regulators. An active archive technology can alleviate data bloat and free up performance resources to streamline applications.

4. Improve Information Governance

The risk of non-compliance if information is not properly retained and secured is an escalating concern for enterprises today, reflecting a trend of increasing industry regulation. Needs no longer are met by archiving backup files or application-specific archiving solutions. By implementing leading-edge archiving solutions and a solid governance strategy, organizations are realizing a significant reduction in IT portfolios and costs.

5. Support Management of Exponential Growth

By definition, archiving at an enterprise level means that data from all business applications is archived in a consistent way into an enterprise archive solution. IT executives are starting to take notice, and more are including a comprehensive archiving strategy and associated technologies into their information management vision. These organizations are gaining a significant advantage, relative to their peers, while dramatically reducing IT budgets and re-investing in IT innovation.

Erik Raper is Senior Vice President at Paragon Solutions, a leading advisory consulting and systems integration firm.