EXCLUSIVE IBRS ANALYSIS: How to avoid archiving project failure

Conclusion: As discussed in “Backup is not Archive!”1 all IT organisations should evaluate deployment of an archival platform. However, based on numerous client conversations and a recent survey, it is clear there are significant project risks in implementing archiving. One-quarter of archiving projects take more than two years to implement and nearly half of IT managers state that they would not recommend the archiving product they had selected!

Observations: Over the last 18 months IBRS spoke to a number of organisations that have experienced significant problems implementing archiving. To collect more information, IBRS conducted a survey2 on archiving in Australia and New Zealand in September 2008 through to November 2008. The survey focused on the business drivers and the status of archiving implementation, and attracted 51 responses from a wide range of organisations.

Why Do Organisations Implement Archiving?

Most respondents stated that technical benefits – reducing storage hardware and operational costs, avoiding purchasing more primary disk and reducing the backup window – were more important than the business benefits of enabling compliance and e-discovery. This indicates that archiving is being viewed as a technical tool to deal with the growth of data and its storage requirements. Part of the reason for this is that IT managers are finding it difficult to engage the business managers in conversations about the benefits of archiving.

A common IT complaint was the difficulty in getting business to participate in defining archival policies. If an organisation has a Business Records and Document Management Framework, IT managers should leverage this framework to drive creation of archiving policies, otherwise treat archiving as a technical project to create a storage tiering architecture.

What data are organisations archiving?

The survey found that email is the most important data type to archive; with 93% of respondents saying this was either “important” or “very important”. File data was the second most important with 85% saying this was either “important” or “very important”. On the other hand, SharePoint was the least important data type; with only 35% of respondents saying this was either “important” or “very important

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Source: searchstorage.techtarget.com.au
By: Kevin McIsaac