The Rising Demand for Integrated
Content Archiving

By Sheila Childs

Across all industries, companies are finding that their requirements to retain information are increasing, often more quickly than they can manage. More information is being created and stored now than ever before, according to a report recently issued by IDC on the expanding digital universe. Users expect that they will be able to access information from anywhere, at any time. Information workers generally have no regard for the format of information – what’s important is the information itself. The expectation is that data is there, it’s useful, and it’s understandable in whatever form it takes.

While virtually every company has information that needs to be broadly accessible, there are also requirements to protect and limit access to some data. Corporate and IT governance requirements are generally put in place to manage this, and to preserve what’s important. Through the years, industry and government regulations have stipulated additional requirements for information preservation, protection and accessibility.

Information managers are looking to deliver it all: around-the-clock access to information for business value, and preservation and protection in accordance with compliance and governance requirements – all at a manageable cost. Enterprise content management (ECM) solutions have proven to be the choice for management of content for business value. So, what’s new?

The Emergence of Convergence: ECM and Content Archiving

Archiving, the age-old staple for better IT operations, is now becoming a fundamental component of an enterprise content management platform. Archiving provides a “warehouse” for information, and retains it in a fashion that enables complete confidence in its integrity, authenticity and relevance – an absolute requirement for compliance and governance.

The marriage of enterprise content management systems and archiving delivers many benefits that aren’t available with standalone archival systems.

Take compliance. The compliance officer is looking to protect information and conform to policies for all data types. In the case of archiving, this requirement manifests itself in the form of an integrated content archive. This new type of archive provides the ability to ingest, store, and manage various types of content including reports, unstructured user data, email, application and database data, and new content types as they emerge such as blogs, wikis, mashups and other “Web 2.0” content types. An integrated content archive will provide access to all information related to a specific search. For example, a search as part of an internal audit related to customer care should return all information related to the query whether it’s an email, customer transaction, financial statement or billing information. An integrated content archive is important for eDiscovery because when a company is litigated, they have a duty to provide all information related to the discovery request.

Integrated Content Archiving – Archiving Grows Up

Archiving did not always provide the extended value it does today. Originally, archiving was seen as a tool that IT could deploy to save specific information that needed to be saved for corporate record keeping or long-term historical preservation. It was (and is) a tool that can remove older, infrequently accessed data from production systems so that the systems run better, backups complete faster, and storage can be managed more cost-effectively. This archiving “use case” delivers tremendous benefits in terms of cost savings and storage optimization, and continues to be in high demand as part of an IT information management strategy.

As enterprises shift their focus to governance and risk and compliance, the list of archiving “use cases” has been expanded. It’s a small step forward to begin using the archive for compliance and applying policies for retention management, records management and disposition. The archive with associated policies offers up a “compliance infrastructure”: a system that identifies and stores relevant information, manages it, and gives access to it in a controlled fashion when required.

Moving forward, the integrated content archive offers companies the ability to leverage the fixed content that has been archived for purposes well beyond compliance. All sorts of applications and business processes benefit from an ability to leverage historical information. For example, access to buying patterns, costs to develop, complaints and feedback about products that have been built in the past can influence products that will be built in the future. These types of “use cases” for an integrated content archive represent a business edge for visionary companies who see the benefit to storing fixed content in such a way.

ECM and Integrated Content Archiving – Better Together

Together, an enterprise content management platform and integrated content archiving system have a significant role to play in any corporate environment. Managing multiple content types is key. Services associated with the platform, such as retention management, security, classification and federated search play an important role in delivering an “information compliance infrastructure.” Moving forward, the opportunity to leverage the archive for business value provides tremendous business opportunity that complements and expands the value of ECM.