Moving aging, stale or infrequently accessed data from high cost, high performance production storage to lower cost, high capacity value tiers of storage can be easy to justify in enterprise organizations. However explaining the value proposition of archiving this same data in small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is sometimes less clear-cut as they may already store aging emails and file data on low cost local hard drives, inexpensive network file servers and even with Internet cloud storage providers. So in order for SMBs to justify the implementation of archiving software, they need a formula to follow that shows how archiving can reduce ongoing operational costs as well as eliminate future capital expenditures.
To show how the use of archiving software and centralizing the storage of data is cheaper and better than not using archiving software or storing data on a variety of low cost storage devices, SMBs can follow these four steps:
- Identify someone to champion the cause internally within the organization
- List the primary applications that are driving data storage growth
- Factor in all of the costs associated with storing data across a distributed storage infrastructure.
- Quantify what new benefits will be realized once a central archived data store is created
Step 1: Identify someone to champion the cause internally within the organization. While it can be anyone within the organization, the individual most likely will either come from IT or Legal. In talking to David Campbell, Symantec’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for Enterprise Vault, he frequently sees someone from IT as being the champion for this business case. IT touches multiple areas within an organization so IT has a better handle on where this aging and stagnant data is actually located and how much there is.
Step 2: List the primary applications that are driving data storage growth. Campbell says that collaborative platforms like SharePoint, social media platforms and wikis make the sharing of information incredibly easy and affordable. But at the same time these create a huge number of storage issues both in terms of the size and redundancy of the files that people generate.
Employees today have almost unrestricted ability to create and retain any kind of data, be it the form of audio, graphics, text or video. So for the individual tasked with identifying the primary applications responsible for storage growth, they need to look at the obvious applications such as file servers, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint, but also be on the lookout for those applications that generate and store large amounts of audio, graphic, video and, to a lesser degree, textual data.
Step 3: Factor in all of the costs associated with storing aging data across a distributed storage infrastructure. How easy or difficult this is really depends on how the SMB is currently managing their data. If files are already centrally stored on a file server or emails are kept on the Exchange server, the business case for archiving becomes a little easier to justify.
Even if these applications are using internal disk drives or low cost network server to store the data, archiving data frees up storage capacity on production servers. This extends the life of the existing production hardware, will likely improve its performance (especially in the case of Microsoft Exchange) and shortens backup windows of these applications since there is less data to backup. Further, once email and file data is archived using a product like Symantec Enterprise Vault, organizations may see up to 40 – 60% saving in storage capacity in the archive since the data is deduplicated in the archived data store.
However environments where the data is distributed and stored across low cost storage devices should not assume they cannot benefit from archiving software. Campbell says that Symantec has seen a lot of its customers justify the cost of archiving solely by eliminating the PST problem. There was one customer with about 1000 end users that took into account not only the amount of storage that the PSTs were consuming but also looked at the IT and help desk challenges that managing these distributed PSTs was creating.
Every month 10% of the calls coming into this customer’s help desk were associated with users trying to find lost emails. By installing Enterprise Vault, this customer got all of the individual PSTs off of file shares and individual laptops and into a central archived data store. He says, “This customer dramatically decreased the amount of time they were spending on help desk calls and also enabled self-service search along the way.”
Step 4 – Quantify what new benefits will be realized once a central archived data store is created. As the last point brought out, SMBs can begin to leverage this central repository of archived information in ways they never could before and, as a result, see new benefits.
By far and away, responding to law suits and providing quick access to information to fulfill electronic discovery events is a very compelling reason to put in place archiving. By doing so, you no longer need to rely on legacy information stored by backups on disk or tape that has not been indexed and which does not provide any capabilities to do item level search or preservation that is needed during an eDiscovery.
Organizations in North America are becoming increasingly aware that lawsuits are impacting everyone and are required to meet guidelines that they have a defensible retention and disposition policy. By enabling archiving and using a solution like Symantec Enterprise Vault, SMBs can put their best foot forward with minimal effort and resources required. Campbell says, “SMBs can potentially achieve those objectives by quickly finding information plus Enterprise Vault’s scalability gives SMBs the flexibility to modify their retention periods or modify their overall archiving policies to meet new needs that emerge as they grow or as new laws are passed.”
The need for archiving in SMBs can appear on the surface to be both hard to justify and difficult to apply to their environment. But as these steps illustrate, there are ongoing operational costs associated with NOT archiving data regardless of how SMBs currently store data now, be it centrally or in a distributed fashion. Further all organizations are coming to the realization that there is a real cost associated with not complying with new laws and that if they try to comply reactively, they will eventually be bit with a high legal eDiscovery bill. By implementing archiving software like Symantec Enterprise Vault, organizations can realize these immediate benefits while avoiding some unpleasant surprises later on.