Four data archiving must-haves to maintain the value of content

Data archiving is often framed as a simple exercise in cost reduction—a way to move “cold” data to cheaper tiers to optimize storage spend. While the financial benefits are clear, this narrow focus overlooks the primary technical challenge: enabling straightforward compliance and maintaining the integrity and usability of business records long after the originating application has been updated or decommissioned.

In the long run, the risks extend beyond storage costs to include compliance issues and the challenge of maintaining data context and usability. When these aspects are preserved through innovative data archiving solutions, archiving can be implemented earlier in the data lifecycle, compliance becomes more defensible, and data transforms into a valuable historical asset that supports AI-driven transformation. 

To transform archiving from a passive repository into a functional extension of your data ecosystem, your strategy must prioritize these four imperatives.

# 1: Seamlessly combine structured and unstructured data

Most business transactions are a combination of structured data and content. Data archiving software must archive and faithfully retrieve any file or data type, including structured data from commercial and custom applications, such as ERP or HR applications. Capturing both the metadata and content, including attachments, data tables, and other relevant files, ensures the content and the relational data are not only properly retained but also make it more defensible in the long term and better support a future move to the cloud.

Some solutions are strictly limited to archiving data from reports. This may work in some instances, but a much more powerful model is to capture and maintain the structure of the data so it can be accessed and reported in more useful scenarios downstream, and AI can make more sense out of how to interpret the data in the future.

What’s needed is a high-fidelity representation of the original structured data in context, along with the associated attachments. From there, data can be searched, displayed, and analyzed in business-safe views. Searching and reporting can be easily adjusted as needs change, and AI can more easily combine grounding in archived data with current data from any application.

#2: Incorporate data archiving into daily workflows and processes

Integrating archiving with content sources simplifies data ingestion and user access, making archived data available within daily work from current applications. By integrating into users’ existing workflows and experiences, users are more productive, with powerful, familiar reports and navigation that directly link to archived data.

For example, SAP data archiving solutions can offload aging SAP data while maintaining access within SAP for everyday users. Similarly, for teams reliant on Salesforce, organizations can enable users to easily locate archived records for specific customers, with the option to incorporate search and display screens within the app. Even for decommissioned mainframe applications, users can access reports or screens that mirror the previous interface, providing the comfort needed to maintain productivity.

#3: Realize more value from data archiving through GenAI grounding

To further boost the accessibility of archived data, tools such as GenAI help users search and analyze data, providing an intelligent content management assistant at their fingertips. With GenAI embedded directly into data archiving solutions, users can better understand and contextualize data, accelerating daily tasks.

In addition to enabling faster access to reports and individual records, GenAI can be applied to data stored in the data archive to produce summaries and generate charts, graphs, and tables from unstructured data on the fly. For example, users could ask, “Chart this month’s data on a line graph,” converting data into insights.

#4: Maintain compliance and ensure data sovereignty

Compliance is a key driver of data archiving, as organizations must ensure adherence to regulatory and privacy requirements. Organizations should look for solutions that preserve the original data’s context—ensuring defensible compliance and information governance through multi-phase retention, data encryption, and complete audit trails. By ensuring data is securely preserved and easily available for collection, organizations mitigate risk tied to legal holds.

In addition, it’s paramount that data archiving software can manage data within required jurisdictions to support data sovereignty and country-specific privacy regulations. For global organizations required to keep data in-country, can the data archiving software manage data without adding unnecessary management overhead and infrastructure costs? Look for needed deployment flexibility, able to store data where desired via a network of archives, with one centralized management console to support all operations.