Archiving in the Technological Era

Data retention has long been a vital businessbusinesses to implement a comprehensive data
practice, allowing companies to use clientretention system are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
information, assess company growth, and retrievethe Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
and manipulate data on past performance, all withAct of 1996 (HIPAA) and BASEL II. The
the goal of propelling business growth andSarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposes strict
success. A number of factors contribute to astandards regarding the retention of accounting
company's need to retain data, such as futuredata, was overwhelmingly passed in 2002 by the
analyses of business processes and complianceUnited States House of Representatives and the
with government regulations that continue to laySenate. HIPAA, commonly known as the Privacy
out stricter requirements regarding the retention,Rule, is a health industry standard aimed at
disclosure and disposal of business data. Theallowing the flow of patients' health data for health
technological era has brought about a proliferationresearch purposes without disclosing an individual's
of electronic file data, spurring revolutionary"protected health information," and requiring
change in the way data is collected, retrieved,entities to preserve and be prepared to readily
archived and disclosed.disclose data for six years. Similarly, BASEL II
Businesses are faced with the challenge ofplaces disclosure requirements on the financial
adhering to varying data retention requirementsindustry.
at the federal and state levels. Many recent lawsEver increasing data retention requirements also
have increased the length of time that businessesplace monumental pressure on enterprise data
must retain data, placing increasing pressure onavailability software companies to produce the
companies to institute data archiving systemsmost advanced archiving solutions with
with the capacity to securely store increasingtremendous capacities and prolonged reliability.
amounts of information, possibly for decades.Available data archiving solutions give companies
Besides placing time requirements on datathe capability of storing great amounts of data
retention, regulations also require that data bethat is no longer needed for business purposes in
secure, unable to be edited and produced ona protected, non-editable format in a location that
demand with short notice. To ensure security andwill not affect the data that is crucial to business
that records are retained in a non-editable format,operations. Such systems can provide a user
organizations must have an archiving systemfriendly interface to streamline implementation of
separate from the operational and reference dataa company's data archiving strategy, and
that is still needed for frequent businessautomatically discard information once it reached
transactions and queries.the mandatory data retention time frame.
Some notable sanctions propelling the need for