I mentioned in my previous post that archiving to a corporate repository gives you the opportunity to reduce the size of massive databases. By archiving your corporate data in flat file formats, you can compress a great deal of extra space. As a result, you’ll end up with relatively small and highly manageable archives.
But make no mistake about it: you still need to manage these archives.
Managing Data Proactively
Think of your corporate archive repository not as an attic full of clutter, but rather, as a corporate asset that requires careful, proactive management. Much like a production application, your corporate repository will need regular backup for disaster recovery purposes. So, although you may no longer use tapes as your primary (or sole) means of archiving data, you may find yourself continuing to use them to back up your repository in case of natural disasters, fires, and the like. And as with a production application, you must manage your corporate repository with an eye for the end of the data lifecycle. Some of the data in your retired and archived applications will expire over time. You don’t need to keep it forever – and you really shouldn’t, because it may expose you to unnecessary legal liability. When you’re no longer obligated to keep data for legal or regulatory purposes, you’ll want to delete it without a trace.
One of the key advantages of the corporate archive repository is that it allows you to do just that. The data in your repository will live in individual archive files. When its useful life expires, you can simply delete it, one archive at a time. A good enterprise data management solution, such as IBM Optim, will even let you automate these deletions with the help of your favorite corporate scheduling tool.
Setting Up Painless Audits
Having a corporate repository also facilitates the other major prong of data governance: auditing. To meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, you must store your corporate data in an auditable format. Just as importantly, you must demonstrate an appropriate level of control over your corporate archives.
When your auditors are performing their annual audit, they’ll need to make sure your repository is properly secured, that your data is immutably stored in a way that it can’t be deleted or modified, and that the control tools you have in place support this security. The corporate repository makes regulatory compliance much more straightforward by giving you one place to store data with one set of tools, controls, and procedures. You can easily formalize and document these tools, and apply them to an audit.
As we’ve seen, maintaining a corporate repository is the ideal approach to data storage and data governance. Next, we’ll explore how it facilitates application retirement.
