Meeting Compliance Regulations with Storage - One Archive at a Time
InfoManagement Direct, June 13, 2008
Today’s archiving solutions are typically deployed enterprise-wide to retain and consolidate information for extended periods of time. Drivers for archiving solutions usually cover specific compliance retention legislation or storage management requirements for email, collaboration, file system and network attached storage (NAS) data. Comprehensive archive management can be simplified and become more agile with built-in tiered storage, multiplatform support and active email archiving. These capabilities ensure that data is being preserved for compliance purposes while being adaptable for the future and are critical to enabling businesses to consistently meet evolving industry standards.
While this process may seem rather straightforward, in many cases, making it happen is easier said than done. A business can run across any number of challenges when implementing an archiving solution from understanding the decisions that drive the archiving policies to the nature in which archive data is stored and protected. It is now inevitable that most businesses will need to enlist this technology in order to meet compliance regulations. What can companies do to make that process a smooth and ultimately efficient process?
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Maintaining Integrity of Data for Compliance
Fueled by regulatory requirements, organizations across a wide spectrum of industries face long-term preservation and retention requirements of fixed content (data that will not change). One such example, SEC 17a-4, requires that all electronic records compiled by broker-dealers must be preserved exclusively in a nonrewriteable and nonerasable format. Maintaining the authenticity and accessibility of this fixed content data, such as email and attachments, is the real challenge. To adhere to various industry rules, data needs to be secured in an immutable storage device that cannot be tampered with, while optimizing the performance and availability of explosive data growth.
Ensure Data Authenticity with CAS and Archive Management Software
In order to address these common regulatory challenges, many enterprises often turn to content addressable storage (CAS) devices to simplify fixed content management, ensure content authenticity and deliver increased scalability. This in turn helps control data growth and infrastructure costs while reducing risks associated with noncompliance. CAS devices can include tape, disk, optical, and write-once, read-many (WORM) media.
In order to fully enable the benefits of CAS, however, archive management software needs to be deployed to capture and preserve this data for compliance and maintain high-speed performance in the face of increasing data volumes. After all, a CAS device is only as good as the information placed inside it. Working in tandem with CAS systems, archive management software is responsible for archiving data, such as email and attachments to CAS devices while retaining transparent user access, enabling intelligent data movement between servers and devices, and providing a long-term data protection capability for archived content. By unifying these data management considerations, archiving solutions ensure ease of management, application integration and high performance. The result is that administrators, legal departments and compliance teams can rest assured that their archived data is being stored while remaining easily accessible, in a nontamperable storage device.
Easy as One-Two-Three
Three Key things to consider when selecting archive management software for your CAS system:
Content management and availability. Smart users of fixed content know that online availability will significantly increase the value of their business content. Archiving solutions are ideal for companies that need an integrated approach to managing structured and unstructured data with user and corporate fast access. Companies also want to benefit from the price advantage of tape or optical storage without the operational overhead cost.
Deploying a solution that has this unique product integration enables a truly cost-effective solution for archiving and subsecond access to infinite amounts of fixed content data through the CAS box. Policy based, seamless and easy-to-use solutions simplify management and automate routine archiving tasks, providing a way to quickly and painlessly store and retrieve enterprise content. The full value of your application is leveraged through highly efficient data and storage management technologies that allow content searchable access to pre-indexed stored data when and where it is needed. These key management and availability qualities are critical to a company that needs to comply with a vast pool of regulations, when a timely response is critical. With the ability to access, view and retrieve any and all enterprise content it is next to impossible to break any kind of compliance rules mandating accessibility.
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