The difference between archiving and backup

Archiving is essentially a historic collection of your important data. It is the process of moving data to a separate storage device for long-term retention. It is important not to confuse archiving and backup as the two play fundamentally different roles. How you archive will determine the availability, security and integrity of your data. Certain data must be kept for decades and have a certain number of copies, whilst other data must not be modified once written (WORM). Data has become an important consideration for all organisations. As data continues to grow, businesses demand a future-proof solution that is scalable and cost-effective. The GDPR recognises our rights as individuals to have our data stored compliantly and consensually, so choosing the right solution is an important step.

Compliant archiving is not just storing or keeping information and records, neither backing up data. Particular business data need to be archived in a compliant manner, which means, it has to meet a complex set of requirements defined by regulatory bodies, governments, or enterprises themselves.

Due to the limitations and inefficiencies of legacy archiving solutions, a modern approach is sought that reflects the amount of data processed. Consequently, long-term archiving is now a mainstream choice to protect your documents at optimal cost, whilst ensuring maximum flexibility and security.

Backing up your data is not related to archiving. Data backup is an essential element of your security and breach detection capability. Should there be a threat to your important data, you must be able to restore the data and ensure its ‘availability’. You do not back up data because it is a document that must be retained for 20 years. You back up your data in order to be able to restore lost or corrupt files and return your business to a ‘known’ state. The GDPR states that all organisations (that process data) must regularly backup data as part of their processes and be able to demonstrate the operational and technical measures taken to ensure its integrity. With fines from the ICO a common occurrence, non-compliance can be expensive and the reputational damages alone severe.

Choosing the correct method to store your important data is a vital part of your disaster recovery and compliance. Keeping your data secure and compliant protects your business.

The combination of backup and long-term archive makes sense for most companies: 1) it secures the data in the short term; 2) it guarantees the integrity and immutability of the particularly relevant data in the long term; and 3) it also creates extended ransomware protection for data at the storage level.

Archive and backup data should be managed as efficiently as possible. By consolidating archive and backup in a uniform, central storage platform, synergy effects in terms of effort and costs as well as reduced IT complexity can be achieved. Such centralization can be easily implemented with a softwaredefined approach.

The focus of modern archiving solutions is on flexibility, independence, and scalability. Long-term cost and effort savings for the IT department are also high on the list of requirements.

The software-defined approach is based precisely on these parameters. A software solution delivers the archive intelligence, not the storage hardware. With this approach, all archiving functionalities across the entire storage environment are bundled and made available on a central surface - for archive and backup data. As a central platform, the archive software takes care of data integrity, WORM storage, encryption, and retention management.

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