Archiving Software

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.