The volume of digital information continues to skyrocket, and as such businesses need to consider how they will archive, index and govern today’s newly created information, along with previous late-stage information. Why is this important? Essentially, so that it is readily accessible by users for corporate history.
Organizations reap major benefits when it comes to long-term archiving, and corporate records-management in an effective and efficient manner will create a distinct competitive advantage in the forms of efficiency, productivity, and so much more. While the process of archiving isn’t an obstacle, figuring out what data to archive can be.
BackOffice associates covered this in a recent blog, saying that decision-making is the first crucial step for the what, when, and why of archiving. But how does one decide?
“Data that is no longer relevant to an organization and data that is not ready to be used by an organization forces a decision by the leadership of that organization whether to invest the time to make that data both relevant and ready or move that data off to an archive or off for deletion,” the company noted in the post.
Of course, the matter is complicated by compliance, mainly as it pertains to policy and retention for legal matters.
“Every technical move of data, regardless of tooling decision around archiving, should tie back to a policy decision made around archiving so that the proper stakeholders can trace back each movement of data to the reason that movement was needed.”
Despite what the future holds, legal, regulatory and business obligations are only increasing.
Exponential data growth, increasing regulation, new communication channels and the desire for on-demand access have created a "perfect storm" of new requirements, but one thing is for sure: cleaning up data and instituting information governance in the form of archiving is a necessary step for a tight-running ship.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson