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Cloud archive: What is it? and what types of cloud archive services exist?

Data Storage Environment Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technoloiges The aim of a cloud archive service is to provide a data storage environment

Data Storage Environment

Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technoloiges

The aim of a cloud archive service is to provide a data storage environment as a service that is optimised for long-term data retention, security and compliance with data regulation policies.

Once in the cloud archive, data must be easily searchable via metadata; protected from overwrites or tampering; and provide client- or legally specified, automatically applied data retention policies. You must also have confidence that your data is in safe hands and protected by sound disaster recovery systems.

Advantages of the Cloud Archive

The advantages of cloud archiving become clear when you look at the cost of implementation and maintenance of private mass archival storage, especially for organisations with large data retention obligations. Ownership of private archive infrastructure is a costly and management-intensive exercise. Due to the inherently long-term nature of archive storage, multiple hardware refreshes will be required throughout the lifecycle of the data, support contracts must be maintained, and staff turnover taken into consideration. With cloud archiving, by contrast, there are many choices available with regard to how and where archives are hosted and how users can access their archived data.

Hybrid cloud archiving vs fully cloud-based services Hybrid cloud archiving is one step toward the cloud from the traditional in-house approach. Archived data that may require high-speed access is retained internally while lower-priority archive data is moved to low-cost, cloud-based archive storage.

A fully cloud-based archiving infrastructure, on the other hand, is a viable option that is especially suited to organisations that don’t have the experience or resources to maintain private archiving storage infrastructure.

In deciding between hybrid cloud archiving and a fully cloud-based archive service, there are a number of questions arise that will govern your final choice. These include:

  • Are the data indexing, searching, retention and legal compliance aspects of the service compatible with our requirements?
  • Should the archive reside in the public or private cloud space?
  • What are the implications of this choice for data security and disaster recovery?

If you want help with these questions give us a call and we will show you how using FileArchiver will simplify this process for your company. Why not try it out for free

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