Organisations can gain a number of benefits by implementing a data archiving system but these will depend on the requirements, the situation and the type of organisation.
- An efficient data archiving process can be far more cost effective than using the traditional method of simply adding more storage (disks) and servers.
- Data archiving packages ensure that legislation and compliance issues are adhered too. Many organisations have to comply with strict codes of conduct or face being fined. These include banks and other financial services organisations as well as legal practices and organisations that retain medical records.
- Data archives can be used to retrieve information at a later stage if a suspected misdemeanour or criminal act has been suspected. This has become particularly important over recent years due to many incidents of criminal activities, such as drug dealing using companies’ computer resources and even issues around terrorist activities.
- Save on storage. One of the aims of a data archiving system is to enable a company to maximise it technology assets, so rather than having to invest heavily in new equipments, a data archive can be a far more cost effective method of storing information.
- Increase network and application performance. If data and files are stored on a separate system, the performance of a network server can be greatly enhanced, simply because it frees up space on hard-drives.
- Data archiving systems can compress the information thereby reducing the storage requirements of an organisation.
- Data or content archiving systems may automatically ensure that documents or records are not duplicated. Again, the replication of the same information can be a massive overhead on an organisations’ resources
- If a policy can be agreed in order to identify what records should be kept and what can be discarded, the returns on investment can be very positive.
- Organisations are required to keep records of certain types of information, such as financials and similar information for a specific time period.
- It allows organisations to maximise the value of their Intellectual Property (IP) either through potentially selling the information that is unique and of benefit to other companies (conditional that it is not undermining the organisations competitiveness).
- It allows other personnel in the organisation through the use of effective archiving to find information that they require, for example for a project that is similar to one that has been completed before. As a result, there is no need to ‘reinvent’ the wheel and that person will save considerable time (and therefore money!) in having to generate the same information. Companies should maximise the re-use of their information and intellectual property.
- Mitigation of breaching regulations. Implementing a data archiving system minimises the risk of being in breach of key codes of practice and other legislation.