IT Analyst Forrester Warns Data Explosion Is Increasing the Compliance Gap.
Store and forget attitude costs millions as demand for access to historical data grows and business risk increases.
According to a new report by analysts Forrester Research, businesses are exposing themselves to increasing operational risk and costs because of inadequate database archiving
strategies. Archive store specialists Clearpace say that this adds to an increasing body of evidence that shows it is critical that IT managers place the same priority on the long term retention and retrieval of structured data, as they do on managing email and document archives.
Report highlights include:
50% annual growth is reported in online transactional data and repositories.
27% of enterprises surveyed have 50 or more terabyte production databases
64% of enterprises surveyed have over half of their databases on costly tier 1 storage.
20% of data centre infrastructure spend is to support data growth.
In the report, Noel Yuhanna, Principal Analyst Forrester Research says “Database archiving often fails to get the attention it needs compared to other critical activities related to production databases and data warehouses.” He continues, highlighting the compliance pressures now being faced, “An archival system becomes critical when you need to access archived information in response to a legal summons, customer service issue, security investigation or technical issue. The value of
archiving grows considerably as it becomes easier to access the archived data.”
John Bantleman, CEO of Clearpace, who commissioned the research, said,
“With legal demands for access growing conventional approaches to
database archiving are increasingly being found lacking. They focus on
lifting and shifting inactive data from production databases to improve
application performance, without considering how to optimize the way
archived data is stored. Get your archiving right and you reduce
storage costs and guarantee, simple, future-proofed access. Get it wrong
and at worst you could face prison.”
Clearpace’s view is supported by Forrester Research’s report, “Why
Database Archiving Should Be Part of Your DBMS Strategy.”, which
highlights the viewpoint that archiving approaches need to advance from
simply considering how to select and move data into an archive to
encompass specialised archive repositories that ensure data integrity,
security and availability.
The independent researchers questioned 150 senior IT executives evenly
split across the US and UK. The responses indicate that the volume of
enterprise data is growing at 50% per annum, driven by a new-generation
of applications together with a strong demand to retain data for
business analytics and trend analysis. 75% of the survey respondents
state that they are now managing 10 or more databases of at least 1
terabyte. This growth is causing serious performance and storage
challenges.
Typically 85% of production data is comprised of inactive records. With
64% of respondents saying that their enterprises have over half of their
databases residing on expensive tier one storage solutions, the costs of
holding inactive data in this environment are significant and
unnecessary.
Understanding this, many enterprises are identifying and moving inactive
data from the production database into traditional archives such as tape
storage, XML files or another database on lower tier storage. With each
of these types of archive, little or no emphasis is placed on
maintaining long term integrity or usability of the archived data. Data
retrieval times for data stored offsite on tape for example are
typically measured in days, if not several weeks. Furthermore the costs
of dedicating developer resource to rebuild systems and data structures
can outweigh the value that was supposed to be safeguarded by purging
the production database. In contrast, shifting data to an archive RDBMS
adds complexity and requires resources similar to production databases
for ongoing support – hence it rarely fully achieves the desired cost
savings.
According to Forrester’s survey, the top two drivers of archiving
strategies were regulatory compliance and business requirements. With
national and supranational government regulations requiring enterprises
to store specific information such as call records for several years,
and increasing business demands for access to historical information, it
is easy to see why.
“IT managers need to achieve a balance between the compliance demands
for retention and the business demand for economical storage and
retrieval. Current database management system technology is optimised
for transactional processing, data warehouses are optimised for
analytics but both fail to adequately address archiving needs. Worse
still the lines between archive stores and backup, which have very
different drivers and requirements, are all too often blurred.” says
John Bantleman. He continues, “Forrester’s research clearly illustrates
the need for the new generation of archive stores. These deliver both
massive reductions in storage footprints, through data compression,
together with the security, immutability and point-in-time query
capability that enables quick, simple and unimpeachable fulfilment of
regulatory obligations.”
The report ‘Why Database Archiving Should Be Part of Your DBMS Strategy’
is available to download from
