It’s one thing to have established an archive of your business data, ticking that particular box. The next step comes with maintaining this archive – keeping everything running smoothly, efficiently and with an eye to the long-term stability of your business. Let’s cover the best practices of maintaining archives:
Once your archive or Enterprise Information Archiving system is in place, many organizations will rightly have let out a sigh of relief. After all, the hard part is now over – a system has been selected, purchased, and put in place. Older data has been migrated, and new data is being taken in. So what’s left to worry about?
Retention policies – stability and consistency
Setting retention policies for your organization is the next step. Your data retention policy should clearly define what data needs to be retained, archived or deleted and when, based on legal or regulatory compliance guidelines and business requirements. The legal and regulatory aspect is generally more obvious than the business requirements – you have to correctly identify trends for what data will continue to be useful to have, what criteria to set for it, and how long it keeps that usefulness.
Clear retention policies have another benefit – it allows for much of the process of maintaining the archive to be automated, taking the pressure off your team. If policies and retention periods are clear, data meeting certain criteria can be automatically taken in and correctly classified while data that ages out can be automatically removed.
Data security
Ensure the archive is secure and indexed! This means, among other things, spending some time checking permissions and settings. There’s a balance to be struck here; some organizations might find value in letting employees access their historical data in the archive, albeit in a read-only form, and some archives allow for this. At the same time, it is necessary to restrict access to archived data by defining user roles and permissions appropriately. Define your risks and work to mitigate them from day one, and your life will be smoother.
Plan for the future
With AI becoming more commonplace in the workplace, there’s value in integrating it into your archive architectures as well; simplifying searches for archived data, better categorization and better resource allocation through trend tracking have all been floated as benefits.
At the same time, AI has to be treated as any other software – using it in your archiving requires a degree of preparation and the archive itself has to be adapted to it. Likewise, giving an AI tool access is tantamount to giving an employee access – game out the security risks and rewards, and establish a good balance of permissions.
AI aside, track data volumes and trends. Make sure your storage is always keeping pace with the expected size of your stored information and keep ahead of your hardware needs – not only simple volume but also performance, if access to information is being used. Take care of your underlying systems, and let them take care of you.
Your Data in Your hands – With TECH-ARROW
by Matúš Koronthály
Image generated by Canva
