Data archiving is often an afterthought for many businesses. However, its role in upholding industry regulated compliance standards and in a business’s data storage management abilities make archiving an area that deserves more of your attention. With the right data archiving policies documented and in place, you could find your business saving more IT dollars and getting more out of the data storage you use daily.
Here are a few major reasons you need to create a data archive policy, some tips on what should be archived, and how to select the tools you need to get you started.
Reasons to create a data archive policy
As data archiving deals with files and documents you seldom use and rarely think of, it’s easy to see why data archiving isn’t top of mind. But there are multiple reasons to initiate a data archive strategy and policy in your workplace, plus some benefits to doing so.
- Compliance — Businesses that operate in regulated industries are often held accountable for maintaining year’s worth of records in order to keep up compliance standards. In small businesses like those in the medical, financial, law, and accounting fields, compliance is a factor to consider for nearly every document that business handles. If your business has to uphold industry regulations regarding file storage retention lengths, like those who must comply with HIPAA, then data archiving is a must.
- Data storage management — The data that exists in your primary storage should be made up of the documents and files you refer to frequently, or at least within the last year. While it may seem nominal, data storage management practices are a rule of thumb for a reason. By properly archiving items that you need to keep for storage purposes, but no longer refer to as you work, you can increase your business’s processing speeds, free up space on your primary storage for the data you actually use, and save yourself money in IT expenses related to primary storage and backup management.
- Clear guidelines — While data archiving is important, it also will only work as well as you make it work. Creating a data archive policy for your business will provide you and your employees with the structure they need to make decisions on which data is applicable for archiving, and which data should remain on your primary storage. For example, without clear guidelines, an employee could delete a file that was integral to maintaining regulatory compliance.
Creating your data archive policy
As you create your data archive policy there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind: data eligibility, regulatory compliance retention lengths, and archive location.
- Data eligibility — Your data archive policy should clearly outline which documents and files are eligible for storage, and at what point. Typically, a business’s unstructured data is the data most eligible for archiving. Stand-alone documents like Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, word processing documents, design files, and presentations have a habit of piling up on a business’s primary storage residence, taking up storage space for frequently accessed data. These files are easy to elect and move over to your data archive when they’ve been “cold” for a certain length of time. Be sure to outline in your archiving policy which documents are eligible, and at what point — whether this means a document should be moved after a year of non-use, or another length you set.
- Regulatory compliance retention lengths — As you detail out document eligibility requirements for archiving, be sure to pay close attention to any regulatory compliance retention lengths your business may be held accountable for. The IRS expects businesses to keep accounting data on file for at least 7 years for auditing purposes. HIPAA regulations mandate any files containing PHI be kept for the life of the patient. Mandates such as these will have an effect on how you structure your archiving policy. Be sure to pay close attention to the types of records you’re expected to maintain and for how long so that your business doesn’t find itself in hot water over a missing file.
- Archive location — As you select an archive location, or archiving tool, that you can send your archived files to, be sure to consider how your current architecture could make room for your archive. Many businesses elect to use their cloud backup software as an archive, by running a backup of the data to be archived and then disabling that backup job from running again so there won’t be multiple copies of the archive taking up space. This is an easy way to get multiple uses out of a tool your business already needs to utilize in order to keep data recoverable and available at all times, regardless of data loss or deletion. If you’d rather use a tool specific to archiving, consider the type of data you need to archive and then select a program that fits with that data. If you do use an online archiving tool, it’s still best practice to create a redundant backup/copy of the archive that you can access should a problem arise with the tool. You can follow the backup instructions listed above to create a secondary, off-site copy of your archive that can be relied on in a disaster scenario.
If you need to create a location for your archived data, a reliable cloud backup provider like Nordic Backup can help. Simply add your archived data into your cloud backup, and rest easy knowing that the data you rely on is always there when you need it.
