Backup, Continuity, And Archiving Technologies — What's The Difference?
By Mike Pagani, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist, Smarsh
The short answer to the question posed in the title above is: “Quite a bit actually.”
In the age of Big Data and cloud storage, organizations of all sizes now have the means to easily and affordably retain copies of just about anything and everything from a data perspective. However, some critical use cases, especially in regulated industries, require more than just the ability to save everything reliably, bring it all back online quickly in case of a disaster, or run on a duplicate copy to stay up if that is a requirement.
In my experience as an IT veteran of over 25 years, I’ve found that the differences between backups, continuity, and archiving solutions are not always understood and can be particularly confusing to discern on the surface. When asked to delineate between these technologies, I typically explain that the key difference boils down to one of intelligence.
While backup addresses retention, and continuity addresses retention plus uptime, archiving is a specialized additional service that provides policy-driven supervision capabilities on the front end and smart search capabilities on the back end for a selective set of information. Archived information is stored in an indexed, “search ready” state that delivers significant paybacks in terms of saving time, resources and money when preparing and responding to time-sensitive and potentially damaging situations like litigation or regulatory audits and examinations.
Before we dig deeper into the use cases for archiving and the specialized functionality it enables, let’s take a closer look at backup and continuity technologies as a quick level set.
Backup (Retention)
Born from traditional IT functions, the purpose of backup is to store and restore information. Its use is solely for retention. It is not designed to be an efficient source when searching for specific information, especially when you need to search quickly. In other words, backup data is not stored in a “search ready” state.
Since the dawn of the computer age, backups have been needed to provide a means of restoring information captured at specific points in time or when prompted by IT. In times of crisis, large blocks of backed up information can be recovered and restored into production systems so that daily functioning can resume.
Continuity (Retention + Uptime)
Also originating from traditional IT functions, continuity features two or more systems running and storing duplicate data at all times. Continuity is designed to guarantee retention and uptime for critical systems. As with backups, the duplicated data is not stored in a “search ready” state.
Unlike backup systems, there is no restore and recovery process with continuity solutions. In a time of crisis, properly configured continuity solutions preserve daily functioning and uptime. Continuity solutions are typically used for critical business functions where any amount of downtime is not an option.
Archiving, on the other hand, offers much more than data retention and/or uptime. It offers information intelligence.
Archiving (Intelligence)
Driven by regulatory compliance and legal requirements, archiving solutions provide specialized functionality for storing information in an indexed, “search ready” state. When the need arises to access archived information, such as for an audit or potential litigation, the process to search for and review relevant information is much quicker, a lot more efficient, and costs far less when compared to using backups and continuity retained data.
Let’s take a look at a typical use case for archiving to highlight how its intelligence can be leveraged.
In addition to e-mail, the archiving of all communications content, such as Web pages and blogs, video, social media and instant and text messages, continues to rise steadily within regulated industries including, but not limited to financial services, healthcare, life sciences, insurance, and mortgage/lending. The deluge of communications driven by social media channel use in particular is a force to be reckoned with. For example, Twitter users collectively send 277,000 tweets and Instagram users post 216,000 photos—every 60 seconds!
Beyond storing mounds of communications of all types in a “search ready” state for quick and targeted retrieval, the information can be policy-checked for compliance violations in real-time as it’s being captured and indexed. This inherent benefit of archiving provides considerable value for organizations of all sizes within regulated industries where potential content violations need to be flagged and acted upon in a documented review process to maintain compliance.
Capturing Context Is Key Too.
As data sources become more numerous and complex, it is increasingly important to capture them in proper context, especially when it comes to archiving social media and other non-text oriented communications. Consider for a moment how much sense most of your email messages make standing alone. Some vendors will take social media and other non-text message types and store them in an email-oriented fashion within the archive. As Forrester advises, “An archiving strategy focused on email as the sole method for workforce communications is ill-suited to handle the dynamic and more complex data that results from social communications. To manage the numerous channels your workforce uses, develop a flexible strategy that preserves the full context and formatting of every social channel.”
Without a comprehensive archiving solution in place to handle all communications content types in their own uniquely different way, compliance and legal teams are forced to search for and extract the information they need in a manner that’s similar to finding a few needles in multiple haystacks. Consider the negative impact of this manual and time-consuming effort when legal review professionals typically cost upwards of $350 per hour. Business analysts put the costs of such manual discovery processes at “tens of millions of dollars.”
Accessing compliance, legal or audit related communications content that has been archived in a “search ready” state effectively removes the haystacks so that the critical needles—and their meaningful context— can be found quickly and easily when the need inevitably arises.
Mike Pagani is a seasoned IT professional and recognized subject matter expert in the areas of mobility, identity and access management, network security and virtualization. Prior to joining Smarsh in November 2014, Mike held executive-level corporate and technology leadership/spokesperson roles for Stay-Linked, Quest Software, NComputing, Dell Software and others.