Archiving Software

Archiving Software Overview

What is Archiving Software?

Archiving Software supports enterprises in retaining and rapidly retrieving structured and unstructured data over time while complying with security standards and the like. File archiving may include images, messages (e.g. IMs, social media posts, etc.), emails, and content from web pages and social sites. Compliant data retention may require retaining data in its native form and context so that it can be understood.

Also called Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA), archiving software is designed to meet discovery requirements. That means that the archive must be searchable so that all stored data can be retrieved with context intact.

Archiving software is most commonly a requirement for banking institutions and governments. More stringent privacy laws means that EIA has become a concern for private corporations as well. Archiving software will contain features overlapping Enterprise Search, Data Governance and eDiscovery, and some features in common with ECM.

Features of Archiving Software

Leading Enterprise Information Archiving vendors focus on some or provide many of the following capabilities:

Meet legal and regulatory compliance requirements and provide attestation (e.g. GDPR, SEC, FINRA, CFTC, etc.)
Provide high-efficiency low-cost storage for data retention
Unified, centralized storage for disparate sources and unstructured data
Automated data retrieval and retention, with reporting
Tamper-proof “evidentiary” quality records (e.g. non-rewritable)
Configurable policy engine for enforcing corporate policy, industry standard, or regulatory requirements
An automated classification system for data to be retained or discarded based on importance
Apply metadata to ease search, categorization, supervision & discovery
Access controls supporting role-requirements, biometrics, etc.
Granular retention rules to archive content for as long as needed
Employee self-service, search & report generation, with access log
Daily reconciliation reporting to verify data capture
Redundant, disaster-proof, or third-party verified storage integrity

Pricing Information

Archiving Software is potentially complex and provided by specialized vendors as-a-service. Vendors who specialize in information archiving generally specialize in storage, disaster recovery and resilience, or data security. Archiving Software Suites are modular and contain separate modules for managing the many different kinds of data to be archived by source, or by governing regulations.

Price may be relatively modest for small organizations storing limited data from few sources for disaster resilience. For complex corporations facing onerous regulatory requirements and drawing data from a multitude of sources (e.g. corporate social sites, an email server, corporate website, etc.) price will be far greater. Vendors will also provide one-off services like legacy or physical data migration to an archive, third-party auditing, and continuity services.

53 Ratings

CommVault is the eponymous data backup and recovery solution from the company headquartered in New Jersey.

393 Ratings

Microsoft Exchange is a secure email / messaging gateway with file archiving and encryption / data loss capability, available as a hosted service (Exchange Online) or installed (Exchange Server).

12 Ratings

Veritas Enterprise Vault is a file archiving option.

14 Ratings

Amazon Glacier is a low-cost cloud archiving and backup solution from Amazon Web Services.

6 Ratings

UK company Mimecast offers the Enterprise Information Archiving platform for file archiving.

2 Ratings

Actiance was a social media compliance and archiving platform acquired by Smarsh in November 2017. It is now part of the technology underlying the Smarsh Connected Suite. Actiance products Vantage and Socialite are now Connected Capture. Actiance Alcatraz is now Connected Archive.

1 Ratings

Metalogix in Washington, DC offers Archive Manager, a file archiving option.

2 Ratings

Proofpoint in Sunnyvale, California offers Enterprise Archive, a file archiving solution.

1 Ratings

Sonian Archiving is a file archiving option developed by Massachusetts based Sonian and now supported by Barracuda Networks since the November 2017 acquisition.

3 Ratings

Able2Extract Professional, is a PDF converter, editor and creator. It is a powerful PDF suite that cuts down on the time spent dealing with PDFs and has been the long-time choice for increasing PDF productivity in the office.Able2Extract will let you convert scanned and native PDFs to more than 1...