Yes, the "cloud", which so many love to talk about, is the key to transforming the computing infrastructure to get to true IT-as-a-Service and, of course, virtualization is a necessary ingredient. However, that transformation also requires changes in internal IT processes as well. Active archiving is an integral part of that change, because business as usual is not an option. Moreover, there don't seem to be any feasible alternatives.
So let's say that we create an active archive. What does that mean and what are some of the implications? By definition, an active archive contains the production copy of all fixed content data. While the application that created or originally ingested the information (such as an e-mail sent or received) may still have read-access, it loses the right to delete or alter the information. Why? If that application is allowed to alter information, it erodes the consistency and validity of the active archive. If that were the case, from a legal perspective no chain of custody would exist and the data could not be used as evidence in litigation.
By definition, an active archive is data-centric instead of application-centric. It may contain many types of data, and, typically, there is no one application that created or originally used all of the information. Though these applications have lost their power to manage the lifecycle of the data any further, there is an "application" in the form of an overarching software platform that manages disparate data under its wing. Unlike a single-purpose application, no matter how sophisticated and functionally-rich, this umbrella software has to cover a wide range of requirements with deep functionality that is not only analytically sophisticated and broadly functional but must also meet system requirements, such as scalability and performance.
Even though an active archive is data-centric, the software package defines whether or not the active archive will achieve the full measure of benefits for which it was built. In addition, content-based information (typically filed-based) archiving and database archiving are usually separate because they are typically handled by different software packages. While database archiving is obviously very important to most companies and many business processes, fixed content file-based information tends to take up the bulk of storage today and is the most important source of information related to eDiscovery requests.
Unified Archive, ZL Technologies' overarching software for active archives, exemplifies what is needed as the software cement for an active archive. Unified Archive manages the capture and ingestion of a wide range of types of content-based information. Of course, e-mail oriented applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, are primary data sources but Unified Archive is much more than an e-mail archiving solution.
