Evaluating Four Vendor Solutions for Managing Data Growth
Given the exponential growth of data in the enterprise and the continued need to manage, regulate and maintain this data, this report assesses some of the top offerings in the data archiving market to assist enterprises in making strategic decisions on how to manage data growth. Technology optimization creates a need to reduce costs as well as to optimize database content to enhance performance.
Although we did make functional comparisons among the products, what is equally important here are the drivers and use cases for data archiving technologies. These solutions also can be used to consolidate applications as part of a renewal and retirement process for technology that enhances innovation. Increasing rates of application retirement and the increasing requirements in compliance and e-discovery have caused enterprises to take a closer look at data archiving.
We surveyed vendors, users and systems integrators on six sets of criteria, involving market execution and user experiences, as well as solution criteria and vendor resources. We found a very close race, where the focus has changed from more technical criteria to better data planning via data usage and growth analysis; simulation of archive policies, including preview of data prior to archiving and purging; and process management via a centralized view across multiple applications, databases and operating systems.
Among the trends we saw: data archiving is seen as a stand-alone feature despite a broader Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) footprint, and data masking remains a critical feature, due to privacy concerns. Archiving solutions have been historically designed for IT departmental managers; now the need is for wider customer usage. Cloud has affected the business model, with users indicating significant interest in Archiving as a Service (AaaS). Enabling access to older data without maintaining the retired application is a key driver for data archiving, making possible cost savings and operational audit abilities.
Why are data archiving solutions important for today’s enterprise data management strategies?
- Techniques for information lifecycle management are changing; data is now viewed more as a business object than as transactional data elements.
- Data’s role in the enterprise is mission critical to enterprise health, both positively in terms of competition, and negatively in terms of compliance and regulatory pressures.
- Big Data and exponential growth in the amount of information required to store and manage require a data growth strategy, in which data archiving is a critical element for success.
Data archiving has evolved over the years from having an application-oriented focus (i.e. application performance enhancement) to having a storage focus (i.e. data location for regulatory reasons) and, now, to having a focus on the value to the business of the data, thus elevating the importance of stewardship over how the data should be held, treated and disposed. To rationalize resource and application investment, data archiving strategies are critical to technology optimization efforts.
In today’s enterprise, a well-structured data archiving strategy can help lower Information Technology (IT) costs, improve application performance and enhance data security. We therefore have assessed four of the top data archiving solutions in order to provide an overview of the market for user evaluation. This report offers management insights into one of Constellation’s primary research themes, Technology Optimization.
ABOUT CONSTELLATION COSMOS
Constellation CosmosTM is Constellation's flagship quantitative and qualitative product and solution comparison tool. A typical Cosmos contains 50 to 150 exception-based criteria used to help buy-side clients with product and solution selection across the galaxy of choices. The evaluation comprises of six major categories on a 0 to 5 point scale where Constellation evaluates key criteria in:
- Epic. Composite scores above 4.5
- Stellar. Composite scores between 3.5 and 4.49
- Emerging. Composite scores between 2.5 and 3.49
- Nascent. Composite scores between 1.5 and 2.49
- Laggard. Composite scores between 0 and 1.49
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