Thursday, July 30, 2009

Database Archiving Solutions Help to Meet Data Retention Compliance Standards Efficiently

Large enterprises today are neck-deep with information flooded from all directions in their respective storage mediums. Unused data is continually eating up resources, and gobbling up the organization’s profits. Megabytes gave way to gigabytes, gigabytes have acceded to terabytes, and in the near future, terabytes is sure to escalate to petabytes. The data is growing relentlessly with organizations waking up to the reality of data explosion. The latest data retention clauses for pharmaceutical companies are at least 20 years while nuclear facilities will have to hoard data for 50 years. Database archiving helps in reducing costs, retaining data, and also aids in complying with regulation procedures.

The latest compliance measures cited by the government have made it mandatory for all organizations to retain much of their company data for inspection. These regulations were mostly proposed and enacted by the government in the light of several recent corporate accounting scandals. These laws state the procedures and rules to be implemented by various organizations for handling their business-critical data. The US government actually wants the companies to handle their corporate information in the best way possible. Out of all the regulations, the most critical and important happens to be periods specified for data retention compliance.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA and BASEL II are some of the laws and regulations related to data retention. It has been estimated that there are over 150 federal and state laws which elaborate extensively on the subject of data retention in the US. Today, the retention period is basically determined by the government itself. The data retention period which ranged from five to seven years are now crossing the barriers of 20 to 70 years.

In the face of exploding data filling up servers in the world over, information lifecycle management has become complicated to be implemented efficiently. Database archiving helps in managing data effectively; releasing data is rarely used or redundant to other cost-effective storage mediums. Data retention compliance issues are also resolved through such an approach.

Database Archiving is a widely-used process of plucking out selected records from operational databases which are not to be used quite often. The archived data is then stored in a non-erasable format like XML files where they can be searched and retrieved if needed.