5 WAYS STRUCTURED ARCHIVING DELIVERS ENTERPRISE ADVANTAGE

Transcription

1 5 WAYS STRUCTURED ARCHIVING DELIVERS ENTERPRISE ADVANTAGE Decommission Applications, Manage Data Growth & Ensure Compliance with Enterprise IT Infrastructure 1 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

2 Introduction The exponential increase of information and growing number of systems today s organizations must contend with has caused application, maintenance, and support costs to spiral out of control. Forrester Research contends that information volumes within an organization are growing at a rate of 200% annually. At this rate, the volume of data stored in many organizations may reach the point where information levels actually interfere with productivity rather than contribute to it. Right now, 60% to 80% of data in production applications is inactive. 1 Today, many organizations are already there and it s burdening IT resources and complicating what most knowledge workers need to do to search, consume, and work with business information. What is Information Archiving? Organizations need to manage mass quantities of information, which can be in the form of unstructured content, structured data, or a combination of the two. This puts an extreme amount of pressure on IT organizations to determine the best approach to identify and manage this enterprise information, as well as establish an enterprise IT strategy and technology that addresses archiving. 1 Learn how to make archiving an enterprise advantage, EMC InfoArchive e-book, EMC 2 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

3 In enterprise archiving, the final-form of information is transferred from operational business applications to a central enterprise archive. Once this information has been archived, it is available to everyone who needs it. The enterprise archive can support a wide spectrum of business applications, as well as the various information types that they generate. What Does Enterprise Archiving Deliver? Today, archiving is no longer an afterthought. With the data explosion of that last decade, archiving has come to the forefront as organizations work to maintain hosts of systems that produce diverse types of data. Enterprise archiving benefits businesses and government agencies in several critical ways: Reducing costs and time for back-up, upgrades and database tuning. Ensuring regulatory compliance for data retention, data immutability and audit trails. Improving performance of current business applications increasing operational productivity. 70% of corporate IT budgets support existing infrastructure - leaving only 30% available for new technology investments and IT innovation. 2 Making archived information widely available and easy to retrieve by authorized users. Removing the burden and complexity of maintaining obsolete systems solely for their data. Right now, archived information is of great value to organizations, therefore maintaining and protecting its accessibility is mission critical. To operate efficiently, organizations must gain control and governance of their IT portfolios and establish a solid archiving strategy with an optimized IT infrastructure to manage content and ensure that all data is accessible and actionable. There are several key factors to consider when leveraging a content management platform for information archiving, not to mention risks of failing to meet legal and compliance requirements: Costs of maintaining data in source systems Information overload that degrades system performance and impedes employee productivity Data bloat draining internal resources Inability to access required data efficiently 2 Learn how to make archiving an enterprise advantage, EMC InfoArchive e-book, EMC 3 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

4 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage 1. Allows for Decommissioning Legacy Applications 2. Enables Long-term Preservation & Retention Management 3. Streamlines Application Performance 4. Improves Information Governance 5. Supports Management of Exponential Growth Decommissioning Legacy Applications A typical IT environment contains legacy systems comprised of applications and data that have been superseded by new solutions, or inherited as a result of business mergers or acquisition. Such applications are of low value to the business, but they must be maintained and supported to ensure access to the data they hold which is often required to meet compliance regulations and support reporting, audit or legacy discovery. These applications are often no longer supported by the vendor or are on legacy infrastructure and require specialized knowledge to maintain. As a result, they are expensive to retain and may represent a risk to the organization. As business applications reach the end of their life cycle, they will typically be superseded by other applications with more advanced functionality, better integration or more modern user interfaces. A classic example is when a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is introduced, replacing many older systems. However, these older systems often contain sensitive business data that has not been migrated to newer applications. Consequently, businesses keep these obsolete systems alive simply to preserve this information. Unfortunately for the business, this is done at a cost. Expenses that are typically present include application software support licenses, server expenses, environmental costs and even administration costs for simply operating and maintaining these legacy systems. Additionally, organizations often struggle with decommissioning legacy applications after their business use, which creates a tremendous amount of redundancy across the enterprise. When pursuing an application retirement strategy, an organization must begin by considering a number of business and policy questions: 4 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

5 Which legacy systems should be kept operational and which should be decommissioned? For the systems that are to be decommissioned, what data actually needs to be preserved? Sometimes the answer to this question is to preserve all data, but often only a subset is really needed for business or compliance purposes. For what period of time should the archived data be retained? What relations between data fields will be important for providing business context and for a clear understanding? Which users will need access to the data and what levels of permissions need to be supported? What queries will users need to perform and how should the results be presented? Currently, information archiving solutions allow legacy applications to be shut down and decommissioned, which saves the costs associated with supporting and maintaining them. Archived information remains accessible, ensuring support for business reporting, auditing or data retention policies. The need for change is starting to surface. CIOs are recognizing the importance of archiving by including an archive strategy in their overall information management vision and strategy. A proper archive solution enables large volumes of business information to be stored and managed in a single repository to ensure long-term preservation and retention management. The technical solution is to decommission legacy systems after transferring their data into an enterprise archive. Today s leading archiving solutions archive legacy data so that the system can then be switched off, eliminating all of its associated costs. The archived data is then accessible for all business needs and will meet retention and other compliance requirements. Enterprise Archiving Solutions The benefits of archiving are beyond dispute. Significant cost reductions can be achieved by adopting a holistic enterprise archive platform. With trends in information storage moving more to cloud computing, big data and information protection, organizations require complete solutions for enterprise archiving that are built to allow the user to find the information they need, regardless of the application that created it. 5 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

6 Leading industry solutions, such as EMC s InfoArchive, can ingest and manage structured data and unstructured content in a single, unified archive, providing a holistic view of information. InfoArchive, for example, is based on the Open Archival Information System (or OAIS) ISO standard for archiving that focuses on the long term, digital preservation (through open XML format) and retention management of information. EMC s practical adoption of the fundamental archive principles of OAIS Ingestion, Archival Storage, Data Management, Administration, and Access offers its customers assurance of their data including ensuring chain of custody, harmonized information model, governance, long term accessibility, and security. Through its technology, InfoArchive presents important options for the preservation of data, such as allowing organizations to archive the meaning of the data, conduct table archiving, or through print streaming, capture information as it comes off systems in real time. Today, enterprises are seeking integrated content management products that archive inactive information from legacy applications, allowing them to be decommissioned. 6 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

7 Long-term Preservation & Retention Management Enterprises currently use a variety of tactical archiving solutions, including treating backup as an archive and maintaining 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 enable archiving according to four distinct information types: File Archiving Structured Data Archiving Hybrid Data/File Record Archiving Table Archiving Information created by an application often needs to be accessed by people other than those who created the data, including customer service representatives, marketing managers and auditors. Data archiving solutions that enable information from multiple applications to be made available to approved users, both within and outside an organization, are the new standard in information management and accessibility. For example, should users of the originating application wish to view archived data, it is beneficial to be able to do so from the originating application using web service access API, as is the case with EMC s InfoArchive. InfoArchive is also currently the only open standards-based solution that archives structured data, unstructured content and hybrid records at scale per industry standard. Streamlined Application Performance Businesses today are demonstrating a loss of productivity due to slow application performance, limited access to inactive data stored across multiple applications, and the inability to provide timely access to historical information to users, auditors and regulators. Implementing an active archive technology can alleviate data bloat the accumulation of massive amounts of data freeing up performance resources to streamline applications. Additionally, an active archive strategy 7 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

8 supports an organization s compliance objectives and regulatory mandates for retention. Many existing systems and archives do not provide the features and functions required to meet an enterprise s information governance policies for retention management, disposition and legal hold. By adding an archive technology solution, organizations can preserve the value of enterprise information, satisfy retention policies, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide controlled access to authorized users. Additionally, it addresses other compliance issues such as data immutability and encryption, and enhances find-ability by minimizing information silos. Improved Information Governance The risk of non-compliance if information is not properly retained and secured is an escalating concern for enterprises today. Businesses must manage supporting new regulations that demand retention of complex business records that contain structured and unstructured data in the same record to meet privacy and audit requirements. For many businesses, this presents great difficulty. The fact is, large enterprises that generate substantial and growing volumes of data from business applications must comply with a wide range of regulations, especially long-term data retention policies. Businesses today now risk fines, sanctions or reputational damage if data is not retained or secured. Additionally, companies particularly those in the banking, brokerage, pharmaceutical, insurance, manufacturing, telecom and public sector are facing significant pressure to comply with regulations and rules that apply to multinationals and public companies generating massive volumes of data from multiple applications. Driven by key concerns ranging from difficulties in defining and enforcing enterprise-wide policies for information governance and worries over an organization s abilities to react to audits, investigations or regulatory inquiries, more CIOs and IT managers are driving for infrastructure changes. No longer impressed with archiving backup files or application-specific archiving solutions, enterprise leaders want to redefine data management and push for improved information governance. 8 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

9 By implementing leading edge archiving solutions and a solid governance strategy, organizations are realizing a significant reduction in their IT portfolios and thereby a significant cost reduction in enterprise IT budgets. Organizations can address redundancy issues by enabling legacy applications to be shut down and decommissioned, as well as practicing active archiving the periodic archiving of data and content from production business applications to remove data bloat. In addition to saving on storage costs, organizations have recognized that a solid archiving strategy and technology can reduce costs associated with backup, systems administration, and server and database licensing. Having an archiving solution in place also helps organizations to ensure long-term preservation and retention management, improve application performance, enable business reporting, and support audit or data retention regulations and ediscovery obligations. Most importantly, organizations are now realizing an increase in information governance with a long-term, digital preservation platform that possesses retention management capabilities that truly support fundamental information lifecycle management policies. Managing Exponential Growth By definition, archiving at an enterprise level means that data from all business applications are archived in a consistent way into an enterprise archive solution. 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. Business applications generate many types of information. Facing this reality, an enterprise archive must be able to support documents, images, audio files, database data, print streams, text files and more. Users searching for archived information should be able to access all these forms of information in a consistent way. 9 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

10 Through implementing an archive program, organizations can start managing the exponential growth of information in a complaint fashion while maintaining information governance. Archiving provides a way to address the challenges of IT application portfolio optimization, data governance and the reduction of IT spend. 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 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

11 Conclusion As organizations struggle to manage the growth of information, enterprise archiving provides significant benefits that span across cost savings, performance improvement and risk management. IT Organizations that employ a solid enterprise-wide archiving strategy will gain enterprise advantage by: decommissioning legacy applications for a reduction in costs; establishing the appropriate policies and procedures for long-term preservation and retention management to ensure compliance; streamlining application resources for greater performance; improving information governance for faster audit and regulatory response; and managing the exponential growth of data for greater more efficient data access and investment in IT innovation Ways Structured Archiving Delivers Enterprise Advantage

12 About Paragon Solutions Paragon Solutions is an advisory consulting and systems integration firm that specializes in enterprise information management to help clients leverage information assets for better business results. The company does this through its industry practices, solution accelerators and specialized technology competencies that help clients achieve operational efficiency, business scalability, and regulatory compliance. Paragon works with businesses that are focused in a few key industries communications, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and life sciences. The industry-focused practices work with Paragon s competency groups to address today s client concerns in Process Optimization, Information Management, and Information Insight. Follow Us For more information, please visit the Paragon website at or call 1(800) facebook.com/paragonsolutions twitter.com/consultparagon linkedin.com/company/paragon Corporate Headquarters Cranford, NJ 12 5 Ways Structured Archiving Delivers New York Enterprise Philadelphia Advantage London,UK Bangalore, India Copyright 2015 Paragon Solutions is a registered trademark of Paragon Solutions, Inc.