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What is data archiving?

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Overview

Is critical information becoming a burden for your business?

Data archiving helps organizations securely store structured and unstructured data and content from applications, databases, and content repositories. By preserving historical data for extended periods, data archiving supports regulatory compliance, consolidates legacy data into a central repository, and simplifies IT infrastructure. Modern data archiving solutions maintain data accessibility and searchability, integrating with existing applications and processes to enable on-demand access to archived data. The most advanced archiving solutions provide AI assistance and support agentic AI.

Data archiving

Why is data archiving important?

Organizations must continually assess the cost and resources needed to maintain live data in legacy applications, as well as how heavy data loads impact the performance of business-critical applications. As data volumes continue to surge, businesses face multiple challenges—from meeting long-term retention and compliance requirements to archiving both structured and unstructured data and providing timely data access daily work, legal holds, audits, and other business scenarios.

Data archiving gives organizations a secure, compliant way to archive databases, applications, and documents of any data type. As a result, organizations can lower storage costs, comply with legal standards, improve data security, ensure data is properly stored during its lifecycle, and keep important information accessible over time.

How can data archiving help your business?

Data archiving is an industry best practice to properly protect data and maintain compliance. But the benefits of data archiving have a much broader impact, enabling businesses to embrace digital transformation, maintain information value, and modernize information management.

Implementing data archiving solutions enables organizations to:

  • Reduce hefty storage load and costs: Retire aging systems and infrastructure while improving security, compliance, and data accessibility.
  • Manage operational costs for live applications: Optimize current application support infrastructure for in-process data while maintaining user access to historical data.
  • Support business as usual: Integrate historical archives into existing applications, allowing users to engage with and use information from familiar interfaces.
  • Maintain historical insights: Preserve valuable customer records, transactions, and other company information, giving users historical context when and where it’s needed.
  • Provide business context for AI grounding: Form a contextual grounding for AI systems, improving accuracy and predictability in future AI projects.
  • Improve performance of existing systems: Move data to lower-cost storage to optimize core systems and processes.
  • Keep information accessible to those who need it: Give users instant, secure access to relevant archived data.
  • Reduce legal and operational risk: Store and archive content securely and compliantly to meet mandates and securely retain business-critical content.

What are common data archiving use cases?

Data archiving provides numerous advantages and can be used in several ways to introduce cost savings, infrastructure performance benefits, and productivity gains. Here are some common use cases:

  • Decommission obsolete applications: Modernize and transform business processes by decommissioning legacy applications and systems.
  • Comply with regulatory demands: Address retention, privacy, and encryption requirements and preserve data to comply with regulations and reduce audit and litigation risk.
  • Move data to cost-effective cloud solutions: Embrace highly scalable cloud services to consolidate legacy data and applications. Reduce data volume and complexity by archiving content prior to cloud migration, reducing storage costs and simplifying the process.
  • Support SAP data archiving: Streamline SAP migrations and upgrades, such as a move to S/4HANA, by offloading archived data, while ensuring access to secure SAP data within the SAP environment.
  • Consolidate business records from acquired or merged businesses: Decommission hardware, software, and cloud contracts no longer necessary while making critical business records available to relevant staff.
  • eDiscovery: Create a searchable, secure data archiving repository for legal defense and compliance purposes.

What to look for in a data archiving solution?

When evaluating data archiving solutions, organizations should consider several features and capabilities to manage data effectively, maintaining compliance, data security, and accessibility. Key considerations include:

  • Support for all types of data: Ensure archiving functionality for structured and unstructured data and a wide range of data types, such as attachments, emails, and multimedia files.
  • Preserve business-complete information: Ensure data stays complete, accurate, and in context over time.
  • Advanced search and eDiscovery with GenAI: Leverage a secure AI assistant to more quickly discover archived content, summarize and analyze information, and access custom reports and records in context.
  • Robust security measures: Protect data with proven security and information governance measures, including data encryption and access controls.
  • Support for data sovereignty: Comply with data sovereignty laws in line with legal and geographical constraints of where data can be stored.
  • Deep integrations: Enhance productivity and streamline workflows by integrating data archiving solutions with existing business applications, such as SAP and Salesforce.
  • Deployment flexibility: Enable support for cloud-based, hybrid, or on-premises deployment to fit your infrastructure and budget requirements.
  • Scalability: Meet the data archiving demands of large, global organizations, accommodating increasing amounts of data without impacting performance.

How can OpenText help you with data archiving?

OpenText™ data archiving solutions optimize the preservation and long-term compliance of structured and unstructured data and content. Whether you’re focused on migrating to the cloud, decommissioning legacy applications, or reducing IT costs, OpenText offers flexible solutions that scale with your business. OpenText solutions have archived billions of records and are trusted by the world’s largest organizations. Discover how to preserve the value of your information with the following solutions:

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