Why You Should Archive Your Organization's Data

Practically all organizations are data hoarders and retain data longer than needed in their production systems. While there's no reality TV show about this topic, it deserves a fresh look on why you want to archive your data.

Note that archive and backup are two different concepts:

• Archive is like moving papers from your desk into a filing cabinet

• Backup is like copying papers from your desk and putting them on another person's desk

While both of those are important, there are at least a handful of reasons to archive your data:

1. Increase efficiency to ensure that users can easily access what they need and don't experience fatigue by filtering things

2. Reduce liability by decreasing your exposure of things like data breaches based on who has access to those systems

3. Remain compliant by meeting industry norms or regulatory requirements around how long data must be retained

4. Maintain higher performance of your existing production systems, as features like lists, reports, and search start to slow down with more and more data

5. Reduce storage costs as archived data is not used frequently, meaning it can be stored in cheaper hardware

The format of your data will likely change in the archive compared to production systems. Instead of being stored in a database as rows of data (like contacts in your CRM system), it likely will exist as a set of flat files (like all of those Word docs and PDFs on your desktop).

Also, your archived data will sit in something referred to as cold or warm storage, as opposed to the hot storage that is used for production systems.

Here are the key differences in these types of storage, noting that the temperature is metaphorical (even if you think your data is hot, it's likely sitting in a cool, dimly lit data center):

• Cold storage is for data that are rarely or never accessed (e.g. years old records for regulatory compliance, lapsed customer contracts, and long-term data backups), thus retrieval times will be slow, which in turn means your costs are low

• Warm storage is for data that are accessed infrequently (e.g. marketing campaign data from 6 to 18 months ago, customer service chats within the last year), so retrieval times are slightly faster, which comes with a moderate increase in cost

• Hot storage is for data that are accessed frequently (i.e. anything stored in production systems), thus access needs to be fast and your costs will be the highest

TLDR: Archive your data to be efficient in usage and cost, plus it reduces liability while remaining complaint. Don't be a data hoarder.