Every organization has essential business information that must be kept available over the long term, whether for regulatory compliance, operational activities or servicing customer requests.
Document and data archiving helps businesses organize and preserve their information digitally for long-term storage and access – including everything from legal contracts and financial records to videos, company emails and historical or inactive data.
Document archiving vs data archiving
Document archiving and data archiving are two related practices in information management. While document archiving involves preserving documents and related content, such as videos, voice recordings and reports, data archiving usually refers to retaining large volumes of application data, such as database records, log files and system backups.
The primary objective of document archiving is to ensure the long-term retention of important information and preserve it in an unalterable format. Archived information may be needed for a range of reasons, including compliance with regulatory retention periods, corporate governance, disaster recovery, legal case management, forensic investigations, auditing and everyday business use.
When it comes to data archiving, two key drivers are cost and performance. Over time, enterprise systems that process large transaction volumes, such as SAP, accumulate vast amounts of historical data. Keeping rarely accessed historical data in the live database can negatively impact system response times and increase storage costs. Moving this data to a secure content repository can reduce storage and administration costs, improve performance and simplify system management.
Learn more about SAP data archiving
Data is also archived as part of a program to decommission legacy applications. Retaining the data ensures business continuity and compliance, and enables you to retire aging systems safely.
Learn more about legacy application decommissioning
Document and data archiving with Macro 4
Benefits of Macro 4 archiving
Our archiving solutions help you to:
Meet all regulatory requirements for retaining and managing data
Improve business efficiency by improving access to important historical information
Gain new business insights from a valuable pool of long-term business data
Improve the performance of your business applications through regular data archiving
Reduce your document retention and storage costs
Respond faster to customers using a 360-degree view of all relevant customer information
Create a ‘living’ document archive
Moving your information to Macro 4’s Columbus DW content repository allows you to create a highly accessible ‘living’ archive that is simple and intuitive for business teams to use.
Documents and data of all types can be brought together in a single, integrated archive. Your information can be accessed directly from a web interface and mobile app, integrated with ERP and customer service applications to provide seamless access for frontline workers, and mined for actionable insights using business intelligence platforms.
Ensure regulatory compliance
Our document archiving system has rules-based information lifecycle and records management, which makes it simple to handle requirements such as statutory retention periods in compliance with global regulations – and adjust quickly to new compliance regimes.
Automated retention management ensures that all information is preserved for the correct period, with timely destruction at end of life.
Stringent data security and privacy safeguards are crucial for regulatory compliance. Our solution ensures both, through sophisticated identity and access management (IAM), secure encrypted storage, data segregation, data redaction and data disguising.
Keep a reliable record of your company's actions
Our archiving solution maintains the integrity of digital evidence and can place legal holds to preserve information in the event of litigation or regulatory investigation. Data is stored in a secure, unalterable format, and all actions related to information – such as access, processing and distribution – are recorded in a tamper-evident audit trail, with the option of blockchain integration for added protection.
Extract valuable business insights
Mine a rich seam of long-term business data and use it to gain valuable insight into your company’s performance and future direction. Documents and data stored on our platform can be explored and analyzed to generate actionable insights – or exported for use with other business intelligence systems.
Improve the performance of your business applications
Through regular archiving of older or inactive data, you can save costs by reducing the amount of storage you need. This will make your business applications run more efficiently, too, leading to faster response times. You’ll also use less processing power, so you can get by with fewer hardware upgrades, saving additional costs.
Reduce your retention costs
During the archiving process, data and documents are compressed to a fraction of their original size. This allows you to accommodate billions of items at minimal cost, on cloud storage or a low-specification on-premises server. Efficient storage and retrieval also ensure fast response times for your users.
Our archiving platform
Our document archiving solutions are built on Columbus DW, a powerful enterprise content management product with a storage architecture that is highly efficient and easy to back up, supporting all major storage technologies, including local disk, SANs, cloud object storage and enterprise disk storage. Moreover, the software is low maintenance and quick to install, and can run on multiple operating systems and in the cloud.
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Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Why use digital document archiving?
Having a document archiving solution in place helps ensure that important information is accessible, secure and protected at all times. This is especially beneficial for businesses that have a large volume of business-critical documents to store and manage for compliance or long-term access.
Digital archives address the problems associated with paper archives, such as inaccessibility, the risk of data loss and the need for physical storage space.
Who can benefit from a document archiving solution?
Companies of all sizes can enjoy the benefits of digital document archiving, from small businesses to large enterprises.
For example, legal firms and financial institutions require document archiving to comply with information security standards and regulatory requirements, while healthcare organizations benefit from archiving to manage patient records and meet privacy regulations. Other use cases include the construction, real estate and manufacturing industries, which use document archiving to keep track of important project documents, contracts and financial records to assist long-term decision-making.
How are documents and data stored?
Our Columbus DW software indexes information to keep it highly accessible and searchable, while storing it in a read-only format to maintain an accurate long-term record.
Storing documents in a secure, purpose-built archive, instead of separate folders, file shares or email inboxes, reduces the risk of losing important files due to human error or a technical problem.
How is archived data protected?
With strict data protection laws in force, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), companies must ensure they are adhering to specific regulations for collecting, storing and using personal data.
To help with compliance, our solution offers built-in security and privacy features, such as data redaction, anonymization, pseudonymization, strong user authentication and secure storage. Additionally, businesses have the option to integrate blockchain technology for added security.