Data is the currency of the digital world, and its systematic management is just as imperative as its storage and consumption. The need for robust data protection stratagem should be a necessity for all organizations that deal with the storing, processing, or usage of data. Notably, protective strategies and archival are solutions whose importance cannot be overstated. Simply having back-ups is not efficient enough to meet a business’s data protection needs.
This is where archiving comes in–archiving is a method organizations can use to store data for long-term retention. With the archival of data, businesses can create an online repository that would help save them from internal and external threats. It offers significant data resilience, becoming a turning point in helping data management.
To ensure proper recovery and restoration of data certain norms are directly proportional to effective management of data.
Here are some ways data protection and archiving are critical to data management:
Reduce potential data breaches and security threats:
Breaches of data can lead to severe (often irreparable) reputational and monetary damage. By using proper data protection measures, organizations can reduce the impact of any security-related threats or incidents, and increase data resilience.
Enforce data protection regulations:
Most countries have specific data protection regulations in place, which guide organizations in their collection, use, and storage of personal data. Adhering to these rules not only ensures proper data management but also encourages international businesses to thrive.
Increase accessibility and usability for business:
By archiving data properly, organizations can reduce their storage footprint and save costs on data storage without compromising data availability. Archiving data can also help organizations locate and access information(or data) to retrieve it when the need arises. This can create opportunities for better customer support or new business ideas and increase their productivity.
Data protection would use numerous methods of encryption, storing regularly updated backups, using antivirus software and Data Loss Prevention solutions, to protect data from corruption or loss. Staying up to date with regular updates would create a fruitful environment for businesses and organizations to thrive. This would also help the organizations to comply with the latest industry-standard protocols.
An exciting example could be how Coca-Cola archives preserve their beverage recipes, old adverts, and campaigns and other historical records. A trackdown of this data could help companies analyze their trajectory and make accurate projections for the future. Archiving is paramount if a company wants to track its progress, or understand its patterns as an organization from information they had saved in their database via archiving.
The presence of archived data and information could also be an asset for its employees–granting them accurate information to learn from.
The risks in not archiving data are plenty. An example showcasing this is how in 2010, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Goldman Sachs $500 million for failing to archive electronic communication. On further probing, the SEC found that Goldman Sachs had destroyed emails relating to their mortgage crisis. Not only could failure in archiving important and sensitive data lead to substantial fines, but also to irrevocable reputational damage.
Archiving data would also revitalize the growth of an organization by providing accurate insights that are mapped by the organization’s data itself. That would ensure accurate projections for the upcoming growth for an organization and help them avoid any pitfalls and mistakes.
Another risk of not archiving data could be unnecessary exposure to security risks where an organization could lose sensitive data because they did not archive that data and preserve it, rather than letting it be available to potential threats and risks.
As the industry continues to grow and evolve, the need for sturdy data protection and archiving practices will only increase. These practices would need to be scalable enough to offer varied and innovative solutions.