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Have you ever wondered what happens to all the data that your business generates? What happens to the information that you meaningfully extracted from the generated data? How can you locate it whenever required? Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) describes the process of using effective methods for your business to organize, store, and effectively back up your data. Traditional methods allowed only for the storing of structured data. With EIA, companies can now use practical approaches to store structured and unstructured data.  80-90% of the data we generate today is unstructured – CIO. Relational databases store organization reports and employee data in a structured way that is easy to back up. But with enterprises using many cloud services and other applications for internal communication, it becomes necessary to identify patterns of storing unstructured data, namely, presentations, corporate social media messaging platforms, and email communication.  95% of businesses site the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business – Forbes Storing this information helps the organization to meet compliance demands quickly. There are several tools available to address the archiving of your enterprise information.  But why is it important to archive the information?  What kind of data goes into the archiving system?  What kind of data should the organization necessarily archive?  Once archived, how easily can the organization retrieve the information?  What is the best way to archive all the data?  How do you ensure that the organization does not violate employee and vendor privacy?  And what are the best software enterprise information archiving solutions?  This blog will address all your queries.

What is Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA), and Why is it important?

EIA is the process of storing enterprise information generated from applications and communication channels, namely, emails and social media messaging platforms. The information held could be structured or unstructured.  Organizations usually have storage management to back up their structured data. For instance, consider employee or vendor information that you can neatly organize in a database with a fixed number of columns and a pre-defined data structure. Most database management systems come with this facility.  But organizations these days are facing challenges in archiving the humongous amount of unstructured information such as corporate emails. Considering the regulatory requirements and adhering to data privacy implications, organizations are also eager to find ways of storing corporate social media data. Another notable aspect is that the enterprise information archiving software differs from a backup process. A backup process maintains a snapshot of the existing data in the organization. Most backup tools are periodic and support incremental copies to backup, just the difference since the last backup.  Although backing up is essential, most backup tools, by design, are used during disaster recovery or system restoration. As an archiving solution does, they do not capture data generated in real-time. Thus an EIA platform maintains the organization’s original, historical structured, and unstructured data in a search-ready form to support critical business functions and obligations such as meeting audit and regulatory requirements.

Role of Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) to Transform Your Business

A few years ago, the primary reason for using an archiving system was to manage storage effectively. But today, EIA is essentially seen as a best practice for meeting regulatory requirements and enhancing critical capabilities for the enterprise.  EIA is also beneficial in the case of investigative audits. EIA solutions help different departments of an organization extract and export records as and when required while keeping track of the historical records; here is a list of some key benefits of an EIA platform:

Storage Management

Archiving solutions help provide an effective way to store the organization’s data. EIA helps store historical data in ways that save storage space (on-premise and off-premise) while meeting regulatory demands.  Effective storage management can result in substantial cost savings. So, this could be impactful for small and mid-level organizations looking to manage expenses better.  

Regulatory Compliance

Industry regulations and laws burden organizations with generating multiple reports and maintaining evidence to record, control, and collect data. EIA solutions allow selectively capturing data and defining it per the compliance request.  From here on, regulations will be a part of many other industries, and they will only get more stringent. So, enterprises should consider EIA.  

Investigative Audits

If an organization suffers from a data breach, the EIA process helps to extract reports and recover historical data. The EIA solutions also help maintain an audit trail of activities performed on the data. This way, you know how and where the breach occurred and can build data resilience to protect your organization’s data. 

Supporting End Users

To process the data requirements from various users in the organization, EIA solutions make it possible to query the data based on keywords and provide ways to retrieve the required data, sometimes to meet audit requests. The sped-up and convenient process benefit your end-users.  

Preserving Historical Information:

Organizations must find ways of effectively maintaining and backing up their historical records. The data could include the company’s policies, reports, email communications, corporate social media applications, websites, etc. A wealth of structured and unstructured historical information archiving can be done, tracked, and protected using EIA solutions.

Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Information Archiving in the Market

How should an organization prepare to implement EIA? It is crucial that while organizations look for solutions in the enterprise information archiving market, they precisely understand what to look for and prepare before considering the EIA solution.

  • The EIA solutions should be capable of archiving both structured and unstructured data from all internal and cloud data sources. These solutions should capture all information and be compatible with several file types, ensuring a good reporting standard in a regulatory audit. 
  • EIA solutions should replace manual capturing of the organization’s data. In doing so, ensure that the solution maintains an audit trail, stores the complete metadata, and preserves data integrity. 
  • Customizable EIA solutions are preferred as they provide better control on what data you can capture and the retention period, adhering to compliance requirements. 
  • The latest EIA tools provide automatic keyword search and monitoring features, generating alerts for reporting risks and extracting reports to meet audit requests. 
The organization must generate awareness about EIA solutions among its employees and orient them to embrace its benefits. 

Conclusion

Enterprise information archiving helps organizations effectively and efficiently store structured and unstructured data to track regulatory requirements. It helps to store, retrieve and manage the archived original and historical data while also implementing strict access control policies to the data.  EIA solutions thus ensure data integrity and on-demand access and help organizations comply with regulatory requirements more effectively.

Vaultastic is the Solution

For the best enterprise information archiving, consider Vaultastic. Our data archival & management solution is available as a SaaS to help you store your data and efficiently archive emails. We also offer you a free trial, so you can use our service and assess your archiving needs. EIA is necessary, especially for today’s enterprises, so you have to consider it as it will truly transform your business.

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