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Industries today, and particularly the financial services industry, are being tightly scrutinized by regulators. Companies are seeing massive regulatory fines associated with record retention violations. Moreover, like the fines, retention requirements are growing. Accordingly, regulatory compliance has moved to the forefront of many IT organization's priorities.
Many initial compliance efforts focused on securing data associated with messaging environments. However, the compliance problem, as companies are starting to realize, is much broader. It covers not only structured and semistructured data, as defined below, but also unstructured data.
- Structured data. Databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM DB2
- Semistructured data. E-mail, messaging systems, and enterprise content management such as Microsoft Exchange or FileNet Content Manager
- Unstructured data. File systems, home directories, or any other type of data that does not fall under the structured or semistructured category
Archiving large amounts of unstructured data can be very costly. Imagine having to duplicate and store every full and incremental tape backup on WORM storage for a specified retention period (e.g., three years). The resource burden would be immense. To illustrate, a typical enterprise with 12TB of unstructured data might have to store 20,000 tape cartridges at a cost of well over $2 million in media, tape drives, and libraries. This example, of course, assumes that it is even feasible to duplicate the unstructured data, which likely resides in multiple locations.
Many IT departments have discovered that duplicating tape backups is a significant challenge, to say nothing of the storage capacity involved. Looking at the scale of backup another way, the same organization would consume as much as 907TB of backup media just to back up one year's worth of information to tape using traditional backup software.
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