In-Depth
Video: The Value Case for Archiving (Interview)
The four basic goals of archiving, plus a 3-2-1 best practice recommendation
Long-time archive advocate and global marketing director for QStar Technologies, Steve Tongish, lays out the value case for archiving and describes a best practice developed by QStar in this excerpt from an interview conducted for the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition.
The four basic goals of archive, Tongish says, are preserving long-term data accessibility, meeting risk and compliance obligations, managing storage costs, and ensuring operational continuity. These goals are the same regardless of the vertical industry involved or the data that it is archiving.
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Backup and archive continue to be confused in many business and IT minds, Tongish says, noting that backup involves the short term retention of a copy of data as an insurance policy against loss, while archive is about the long-term preservation of data for accessibility over time. The two technologies are complimentary, but they serve very different goals, he argues.
He outlines QStar’s 3-2-1 Best Practice for archiving. The “3” in 3-2-1 refers to the number of copies of data that should be retained when data is first created: one for fast access in production storage, a second for redundancy and protection against loss, and a third as a copy of record. The “2” refers to media types: keep one copy on fast access media, but your archive copy should be on green, removable media. Finally, “1” refers to guidance: at least one copy should be offline and offsite.
Simple though it may sound, this very basic practice is not being observed by most companies today, placing an organization’s most critical and irreplaceable asset, its data, at risk of loss.
To see the other parts of this interview, visit the C-4 Project at www.c4project.org).
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this link to play the video.