Data Management Glossary
Data Archiving
What is Data Archiving?
Data Archiving, often referred to as Data Tiering, protects older data that is not needed for everyday operations of an organization. A data archiving strategy reduces primary storage and allows an organization to maintain data that may be required for regulatory or other needs.
Benefits of a Data Archiving Solution
Data archiving is intended to protect older information that is not needed for everyday operations but may have to be accessed occasionally. Data archiving tools deliver the most value by reducing primary storage and the related costs, rather than acting as a data recovery tool. Unstructured data archive tools are in high demand because of the opportunity to drastically reduce overall storage costs since most data is now unstructured—and often residing on expensive, high-performance storage devices. Archive data storage, meanwhile, is typically on a low-performance, lost-cost, high-capacity data storage medium.
Types of Data Archiving
Some data archiving products enable read-only access to protect data from modification, while other data tiering and archiving products allow users to make changes.
Data archiving take a few different forms. Options include online data storage, which places archive data onto disk systems where it is readily accessible. Archives are frequently file-based, but object storage is also growing in popularity. A key challenge when using object storage to archive file-based data is the impact it can have on users and applications. To avoid changing paradigms from file to object and breaking user and application access, use data management solutions that provide a file interface to data that is archived as objects.
Another archival system uses offline data storage where archive data is written to tape or other removable media using data archiving software rather than being kept online. Data archiving on tape consumes less power than disk systems, translating to lower costs.
A third option is using cloud data storage, such as those offered by Amazon and Azure. Cloud object storage is a smart choice for cloud tiering and data archiving because of its low-cost, immutable nature.This is inexpensive but requires ongoing investment.
With the ongoing threats from ransomware and other sophisticated cybersecurity actors, creating a secure data archiving and data tiering strategy is imperative. Encryption of sensitive archives, use of multi-factor authentication for access and object lock storage (such as AWS S3) are a few ways to protect archival data from modification, corruption and theft.
The data archiving process typically uses automated software, which will automatically move cold data via policies set by an administrator. Today, a popular approach to data archiving is to make the archive “transparent.” By this, archived data is not only online but is fully accessed exactly as before by users and applications, so they experience no change in behavior. (See Native Access)