Archiving's Big Change: It Needs to Adapt to Change; Interview with CommVault's Simon Taylor Part III

Archiving is receiving more attention from companies for a multitude of reasons. Archiving data can help companies shorten their backup windows, satisfy their legal search and hold requirements and control storage costs by placing infrequently accessed data on lowest cost tiers of storage (SATA disk-based storage systems, optical and tape).

However some of the issues that CommVault® Systems' Senior Director of Information and Access Management, Simon Taylor, is encountering when archiving data are becoming more esoteric in nature. CommVault is used by businesses around the globe and the challenges it is starting to encounter go well beyond just archiving data stored on network file servers or Exchange email systems. Globally companies are being asked to manage archived data on a more granular level to satisfy specific laws.

Jerome: I have heard the term "agility" used in conjunction with archiving data. Why do companies need to concern themselves with data agility within their archived data stores?

Simon: Despite what people may think, archiving changes constantly. Laws are constantly changing which can force companies to re-classify data they had previously archived under a different set of rules or policies. Legal holds are creating new sets of problems of companies. Now you must add another set of retention and management rules on top of rules that you already have in place. These new rules may only apply to a subset of the data. Legal holds require companies to take segments of the information that are managing now, group it separately and then manage it by this separate set of policies.

The situation is more complicated in Europe. In Europe, individuals have a lot of rights to the data that companies retain about them. For instance, in the UK under its Freedom of Information Act, an individual can pay $20 and request that a company provide that individual with all of the information that it has about that individual. The company not only has to produce the information it has about that individual in 10 business days, companies are also subject to the EU Data Protection Directive. This requires companies to delete copies of that data that the individual wants removed. This includes all copies of the data across the company to include archived and backup data stores.

Adding to the complexity, companies need to keep records about hazmat (hazardous material) incidents. In those circumstances, companies may need to keep this information on an individual for specific hazmat related requests in the archives while restricting access to the information for any other purpose.

Jerome: This trend towards individuals having a say-so in what information companies keep about them - how do you see this impacting corporate management of archived data?

Simon: Individuals will have much more influence and companies will need to be flexible enough to comply. In the US, things are already changing to give individuals more say-so as to what data companies can keep about them. What this all means is that companies can not assume decisions made today are set in stone. Circumstances can change in 8 - 10 years and they will need to adapt to those changes. This is the big change in archiving: it needs to adapt to change.

Part 1 in this 3-part series took a look at the forthcoming paradigm shift that needs to occur in information management.

Part 2 in this 3-part interview series took a look at how CommVault's SIS facilitates information management and access as well as how CommVault works with hardware vendors that do block-based deduplication.