At Sonian, we’re fond of saying “backups are for recovery, archives for discovery”. No one questions the wisdom of performing regular backups, that need has been obvious in IT for some time: accidental deletion, disk or server failures, large scale disaster recovery… While backups meet an obvious need, they don’t enable sophisticated search. Most backup tools may let you search on a file name or a file owner, they won’t search 500 different email attachments looking for keywords, or enable a single search across multiple databases. Backups are great when you know what you’re looking for, and not much help when you don’t.
That’s why more modern enterprises are making data preservation a top priority. Sure, there are elements of old-fashioned CYA – the very real comfort knowing important data is preserved offsite for when you need it most. But there’s the rub - what happens when you need to access it? Many factors are driving enterprises to get beyond backups. Costly litigation is often preceded by a “discovery process” wherein companies may need to produce thousands of documents between employees (who may no longer work there) and customers or partners. This process can be painstaking (or impossible) for companies not employing a sophisticated archiving product.
Even absent impending litigation, companies may want to speed audit response or to quickly conduct internal investigations (are these employees having an inappropriate relationship? Is someone sharing our intellectual property with external parties?). You’ll need a sophisticated lens to delve into the dataset, derive meaning from the data, and enable you to decide faster.
Data preservation makes business sense. Cloud economics make it more affordable than ever. Sonian has helped more than 12,000 customers in 40 countries moves more than 8 Billion objects into the cloud and make them immediately discoverable with our fast and accurate search. Get beyond backup and turn your “dark data” into actionable intelligence today.
