Executive Summary
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.