The challenges of archiving structured and unstructured data
Traditionally, organizations had two electronic storage technologies: disk and tape. Whilst disk became the primary storage media, tape offered a cost-effective media to store infrequently accessed contents.
This led organizations to consider tape as not just a backup media but as the organization’s archive which then resulted in using monthly full system backups over extended durations to support archiving requirements.
Over time, legislative and regulatory bodies began to accept extended time delays for inquiries and investigations caused by tape restore limitations.
Since the beginning of this century, the following trends have impacted the IT industry:
- Single disk drive capacity has grown exponentially to multi-TB delivering cost effective performance levels.
- The exponential growth of unstructured data due to the introduction of social media networks, Internet of Things, etc. have exceeded all planned growth.
- The introduction of cloud storage (storage as a service) that offer an easy way to acquire storage services with incremental investment that fits any organization’s financial planning at virtually infinite scalability.