Historically, companies’ data archives have primarily been used for legal/compliance and business continuity – things like eDiscovery, records retention, audits and disaster recovery. While these remain important uses, new Big Data and analytics technology has allowed companies to get much more out of their data archives with successful companies mining their archives for business insights and finding new ways to monetize the information.
A recent IDC study sponsored by Iron Mountain found that today’s most successful organizations are using their archives to drive efficiency and gain business insights. The results are significant. Companies saved $11.4M over the past year using their archives for risk mitigation and avoidance of litigation. But companies using their archives more broadly saw an average $9.4M reduction in operational or capital costs, and $7.5M in additional revenue; combined these figures are even greater than the value of using archives for risk reduction.
Despite these impressive data archiving statistics, many companies are not maximizing the value of their archives. Challenges start with the chaotic state of archiving at many companies. More than half of mid-to-large businesses (57%) maintain six or more electronic archives, addressing everything from email to images to voice data. However, the vast majority (88%) lack a consistent approach to archiving all data types, and 40% simply archive everything to avoid spending time up front sifting through and categorizing data to identify what’s most important. While the most successful companies enjoy accessible “data lakes” that simplify data mining, this “archive everything” approach creates murky “data swamps” with information that’s unclassified, inconsistent, hard to find and even harder to monetize.
Accessibility is another challenge to maximizing the value of archives. Over 60% of lines of business (LOB) and 70% of legal and compliance respondents had frustrations working with IT to get archived information. Further, 49% of respondents believe access challenges are causing LOB to lose significant productivity. Without a defined process to easily access archived information, LOB is not only wasting time but also missing the financial benefits that come from fully monetizing the archive.
So how can companies better leverage their archives? IDC, along with Iron Mountain,recommend hiring a Chief Data Officer to be directly accountable for all data issues including archives, developing information maps of all data sources and repositories in the organization, implementing a consistent archiving approach across all business areas, and working with a 3rd party partner to develop expert archiving solutions.
For more details on each of these recommendations, as well as a deeper analysis of the state of archiving today, download “Mining for Insight Rediscovering the Data Archive.”
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