Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Industry best practice states that your organization needs to include provisions for deleting archive data as part of your data retention policy. Legacy data consumes valuable resources adding to the cost of keeping the lights on.
As your system footprint grows, so too does the annual operating cost, nibbling away at your IT budget. The obvious answer is to purge data and documents that fall outside your defined retention period to free up capacity and resources.
Breaking the first rule of Big Data?
According to industry buzz, Big Data analysis is most effective with the largest data set possible. The reality is that this approach is untenable – even with limitless Cloud storage, your organization cannot hope to store and use every item of data it collects indefinitely.
So you will need to remove outdated data from time to time. Which immediately limits the scope of your Big Data program.
Post warranty systems can extend archive capacity
The speed with which your business can access and analyze data is crucial to developing timely, actionable insights. So the performance gain of on-site data storage is still preferable to an offsite cloud alternative, helping to avoid the inherent latency associated with remote access.
Rather than purchasing new storage hardware, or offloading to the cloud, you can instead redeploy existing assets to increase your archive capacity. Backed by a full service third party maintenance contract, your post-warranty hardware can be used to extend your archive – and the volume of data available for your Big Data program. Extending your data retention period by a few months (or even a year), allows you to work with more historical data, uncovering long term trends in more detail.
Coupled with a decent data cleansing routine, your archive becomes a valuable asset, rather than a checkbox exercise designed to meet your compliance obligations.
For more help and advice on post-warranty hardware support, and how to redeploy older storage to extend your archive, please get in touch.