There are many reasons to archive your data, most of which you may be aware of but some could be new to you. Typically, organizations archive their data to protect it from natural disasters like earthquakes or floods, human-caused disasters like arson or warfare, malicious cyber actors, and internal threats like disgruntled employees.
Another common requirement is organizations being required by law to archive data. This could be for a set amount of time ranging from 3 years to as long as 25 years. This requirement will depend on who you do business or communicate with: if you contract with a government agency there are regulations that need to be followed. For federal government archiving, you can look up the Federal Information Security Management Act, for state and local it varies by state. There are also times that your organization may be required by law to hold on to your records for a court ordered amount of time due to litigation. There are also different archiving regulations for financial, healthcare, schools, and corporate businesses; but they all have something in common: their data needs to be archived.
Archiving also reduces the volume of data on primary storage that needs to be backed up. This improves backup and restore performance while lowering secondary storage costs and reducing your risk of losing data. Organizations without an archiving strategy may end up losing inactive data that is actually still valuable, and this is especially costly since recreating data is nearly guaranteed to be more expensive than archiving it.
In short, here are 10 of the best reasons to archive your data.
- Prevent Data Loss
- Increase Security
- Internal data protection
- Efficient data movement
- Limit access to sensitive data
- Expand data storage to high-scale systems
- Cost savings
- E-discovery in litigation
- Compliance with industry-specific regulations
- Government information management requirements
