When it comes to data management best practices, taking out insurance or taking the necessary measures and precautions to guarantee the safety of enterprise data is a requirement that tops the list. That's why it's critical that IT managers understand the similarities and differences between backup and archiving.

While backup is often viewed as a necessary evil in almost every company, it is a practice that has embedded itself into the day to day activities of the IT organization, and most IT managers understand the potentially dire consequences that could result from not having a backup strategy in place. Like it or not, the reality is that any organization may only be a step away from a server meltdown, an errant sprinkler system, accidental deletion of files, or an outright natural disaster. In essence, regular backups are an insurance policy in the event production data needs to be restored.

Still, many enterprises today find their backup and recovery process strained. The reason is because IT managers encounter a number of common struggles, such as the ability to protect and manage growing volumes of data; the ability to recover data quickly, reliably, and efficiently; and the on-going threat of having to find and restore potentially thousands of tapes in the event of an investigation, litigation, or inquiry from a regulatory body.

Savvy IT managers are beginning to recognize that backup isn't the be all and end all to guaranteeing the safety of enterprise data. What is becoming more apparent is that data management challenges fall into two buckets: the challenge for today and the challenge for tomorrow.

Short-Term, Long-Term
Despite the ease of protecting data with backup applications, the importance of e-mail and the rise in both electronic discovery and compliance requirements present both storage and backup administrators with new challenges. Backups, as secondary copies of data, are designed to help companies recover data damaged as the result of human error or another event, including a natural disaster. By contrast, archiving takes copies of primary data that are no longer needed on a daily or short-term basis and moves that data to another location, ideally less expensive storage, where it is archived for the long term. What's common to both backup and archive is that both entail moving data from an online data store to some other data store, be it near-line or offline for the purpose of data protection. And, really, that's about it.

As a practice, backup and archive serve two very different and important functions for data management at any business. In short, backup addresses the challenges of data management for today, whereas archive addresses the data management challenges of tomorrow.

"Think of data backup as a short-term insurance policy for disaster recovery," says Danny Milrad, senior manager for Symantec's Enterprise Vault product marketing. By making a duplicate copy of production data, commonly achieved by taking frequent snapshots of an organization's data, an IT manager can control, protect, and recover enterprise data that has been lost or corrupted.

In the backup process, data isn't being physically removed from a production system –rather, it's being copied to tape.

Archiving, on the other hand, is a completely different process that addresses a different set of corporate data management needs. “Archiving is a strategy and process that manages and protects data for longer periods of time, while keeping them online and accessible" says Milrad.

With an increase in the number of regulatory and compliance requirements impacting businesses of almost every ilk, protecting data for future access as required by inquires stemming from potential lawsuits the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), other government entities, or human resources, for example, new light is being shed on the importance of maintaining data in an online archive.

Today's archive goes far beyond the traditional practice of storing corporate data on tape. Today's archive not only provides a cost-effective solution for medium to long-term data storage, it also provides intelligence for the timely retrieval of data or access to data for compliance.

Symantec's Enterprise Vault, for example, helps companies reduce business and IT risks and addresses data management challenges surrounding storage management, compliance retention, and e-mail upgrades, migrations, and consolidations.

With e-mail emerging as a mission-critical application in many of today's enterprises, IT departments are finding the explosive growth of e-mail costly, troubling and data protection and management is burdensome. How, for example, do organizations protect their growing e-mail data backed up nightly, when e-mail is expected to be available 24/7? Will a company be able to get their hands on e-mails when legally required to do so?

Out-of-control e-mail growth is one of the emerging challenges facing IT managers today. Archiving, as described in Symantec's Enterprise Vault software, provides a framework for storing, managing, and discovering the content held within e-mail, as well as file system and collaborative environments such as Microsoft SharePoint Servers or Enterprise Content Management systems.

Benefits
Archiving offers enterprises multiple benefits: simplified e-discovery and compliance, information management, operational efficiency, and storage optimization. These benefits target a number of beneficiaries within the organization.

E-discovery and compliance, for example, enables IT to quickly search, discover, and deliver specified content to corporate executives and also provides the legal team with a tool to manage the review process.

With an indexed online archive, users such as human resources, for example, can search available content using keywords and search terms. This intelligent information management retains records, enforces policy, categorizes and tags data, and monitors access.

By reducing the size of data stores in applications such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server or Microsoft Exchange, for example, organizations can realize operational efficiencies and improvements in the performance of primary applications and the speed with which they can protect underlying data.

And, last but not least, storage can be optimized when older items are moved from primary storage to another less expensive physical online archive. In solutions such as Enterprise Vault, storage optimization is also achieved by single instant storage and compression technologies that further reduce the footprint of data.

“For the end user, the migration of data is transparent, but access to that data is routine and doesn't change for the end user," says Milrad.

Working Together
As IT managers understand the different roles that backup and archive play in data management they will also understand the symbiotic relationship between the two. By migrating older data to the archive there is less production data to backup, which decreases the amount of time it takes to backup the data. Backup windows are often very tight and the quicker data can be protected the better.

“This relationship between archive and backup is critical to helping solve the common backup problem faced by e-mail administrators, storage administrations, and others, which is that they consistently miss their backup windows," says Milrad. Data that isn't backed up isn't being protected and ultimately could be devastating if disaster strikes.