Active Archiving Key Strategy for Accessible, Online Archive Data

The Active Archive Alliance announced the availability of a new research study that finds that best-in-class organizations are deploying active archives to keep ever growing data sets online, indexed and accessible without the costs and resources associated with primary storage.

The study detailed in the July 2011 Aberdeen Group research report, Archive Agility: Building Business Resilience through Active Archiving, shows that organizations today recognize the knowledge and business value of archived information and the importance of keeping it accessible. The report details how technology leaders are solving data management and accessibility concerns for Big Data, cloud and archive data by leveraging active archiving solutions.

The study identified the following top four pressures
that are driving organizations to archive data:

1. Too much historical information and data growth
2. Cost to keep data active and accessible
3. Takes too long for end users to gain access to historical data
4. Rising cost of managing litigation and compliance

"Our research shows that best-in class archiving organizations have active archives which provide their end users with fast and reliable access to historical data," said Dick Csaplar, senior research analyst, Aberdeen Group. "The research also strongly supports the use of archiving standards that are supported by multiple companies to protect archives from being orphaned when a single company abandons one of their technologies. The Active Archive Alliance has emerged as the leading advocate of best-in-class active archiving standards, processes and products. It supports active archive solutions that help ensure data integrity with data management features that include self healing, data integrity verification, and strong interoperability amongst participating active archive vendors. The Alliance is a useful resource for organizations considering active archiving."

The Aberdeen report is based on a survey of a diverse group of 113 end user organizations. The report distinguished ‘Best-in-Class’ from ‘Industry Average’ and ‘Laggard’ organizations in archiving practices based on the amount of time to recover an archive file, the number of business interruptions in the last 12 months and lastly, the longest period of time of a business interruption in the last 12 months.

The research brief revealed that the best-in-class companies were adept at managing archived data, as they reported their archives to be just 50 percent larger than their primary storage capacity. Furthermore, even though the size of their archives outranked other organizations in terms of overall bytes, their end-users could access archived files the fastest.

According to the report, organizations enjoying best-in-class archiving performance shared several common characteristics, including:

• 75 percent have deployed archive management software
• 70 percent have IT trained in new archiving tools
• 58 percent utilize open archive standards
• 45 percent have a formal process to ensure redundant data is not archived

The Aberdeen Group report was made available in part by underwriters The Active Archive Alliance, Atempo, and Spectra Logic. The Active Archive Alliance is a non-profit storage industry association dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data. Its mission is to provide organizations with the best practices, tools and information they need to achieve simplified access to the online storage of their archived data.