Archiving: The CIO’s Best Defense Against Risk

It can be difficult for a CIO to make a case for an investment that does not generate revenue. Many businesses do not perceive archiving as a critical business requirement. Yet archiving is the single most effective way to achieve disaster preparedness, address productivity, and confidently mitigate risk.
Manual processes, limited accessibility, and lack of control over unstructured data are all factors that make your business vulnerable. By offering a secure, organized framework to control processes and manage your company’s most critical asset — information — archiving is the most effective way to manage risk.

The Risk of Spending Too Much

Archiving provides a quick return on investment in data storage savings. But a good archiving solution will also help reduce costs associated with technical and administrative activities, as well as address the performance, scalability, and resource challenges associated with explosive data growth.  
Without archiving, backups can quickly eat away storage and tax bandwidth — unnecessarily tying up IT infrastructure. By reclaiming storage and boosting efficiency, archiving improves the bottom line.

For example, email deduplication enabled a company to reduce their email archives by 50%, saving an average of more than $123,000 each year. And a tiered storage model helps the average company save up to 88% annually.

A strong ROI is necessary to justify an investment in archiving, but it does not make the whole case.

The Risk of Not Being Prepared

The business argument for archiving also needs to address productivity, compliance and regulatory requirements, and intellectual property violations. Any of these issues can have a devastating effect on a business — making projected ROI inconsequential compared with the substantial financial losses associated with disaster or litigation.

Case in point: automatic data expiration protected a Consonus customer from the legal risk of premature data destruction while enabling them to trim data storage by as much as 73%, for an annual savings of $100,000.

Not only does archiving provide an immediate and residual reduction in hardware and administrative costs, but a comprehensive archiving solution can effectively address current and future growth trends by identifying storage inefficiencies and addressing demand challenges.

Defend Yourself Against Risk with Archiving

Take advantage of archiving to reduce waste and remain operationally effective. Free up your financial and human resources for projects that generate revenue.

Don’t wait until you’re confronted with a time-consuming legal battle and pricey legal review to realize just how business-critical archiving really is.