Phoenix Launching Archive as a Service in UK

Phoenix IT Group PLC has launched Archive as a Service (AaaS), the UK’s first cloud-based active archive.

Archive as a Service will provide organisations of all sizes, with a resilient and economical solution that will ease the stress on IT departments whilst ensuring data remains accessible to the business.

Chris Coulson, product manager, DraaS, Phoenix, explains why the service has been developed: “With data growing faster than many organisations can manage, our customers are finding it difficult to backup and recover in time to meet business expectations – especially when using the traditional, tape-based approach to recovery. We’re also finding that many of our existing DRaaS customers are exceeding their storage quotas for Cloud Backup & Recovery faster than they had anticipated. This data growth is having a negative impact on storage, backup and the overall RTO. Our Archive as a Service solution delivers significant improvements in these areas.“

On average, unstructured content makes up 80% of data and 80% of that data is inactive but cannot be deleted for practical, legal or compliance reasons. Only 2% of this data will ever need to be accessed again, but nobody knows which 2% that will be. With Archive as a Service, the company has recognised that this places significant pressure on IT departments and systems to store bigger data sets while still providing acceptable performance and rapid recovery times.

Mike Osborne, MD, BC, Phoenix, commented: “The rate of data growth is outpacing cost reductions in primary storage. IT departments are having to continually request further investment in a storage solution that was typically designed to cater for three to five years of data growth. Our customers need an alternative to what’s currently on the market; providing the level of availability and protection expected in an enterprise solution. Archive as a Service meets those needs and gives our customers the added benefits of integration with our existing, award-winning Phoenix DR as a Service capabilities.“

This service is a blend of Scality, NTP and HP technologies, combined with the well-established company’s data protection infrastructure. This enables Phoenix to deliver cost savings and improvement on data management and recovery.

Taking advantage of company’s economies of scale and its decades of IT industry experience, Archive as a Service enables business of all sizes to realise all the benefits of archive, without the significant capital expenditure normally associated with a solution if its type.