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Companies continue to struggle with the ever-growing mountains of data flowing into and out of their systems. Gone are the days of manually filing a couple of hard-copy records per day. Now, information workers send and receive on the average 50 MB (or more) of data per day. The sheer data volume of employees must deal with cause numerous issues, including what data to keep and delete, how to secure sensitive data, ensuring data privacy for customers and employees, and providing accurate and streamlined litigation response.

With the rising popularity of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, data sovereignty issues have become a greater focus and risk for Chief regulatory Officers (CRO) and General Counsels (GC). Data sovereignty is a country-specific requirement that data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is collected or processed and must remain within its borders. Many countries have had these laws for decades, and new privacy laws such as the GDPR are only making them more prominent. For example, countries like Russia, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, and Vietnam (to name a few) require that their citizen’s data must be stored on physical servers within the country’s borders. They argue that it’s in the government’s and their citizen’s interest to protect personal information against any misuse, especially outside of the country’s jurisdiction.

Over the years I’ve written a lot about the benefits of enterprise file consolidation, i.e., storing and managing unstructured data in a common repository.   In fact, most companies still have data spread around the enterprise in distinct stand-alone data silos (usually unmanaged at the file level) including custodian computers, removable media, personal cloud accounts, file systems, email systems, and SharePoint servers (to name just a few).

The question of whether moving to the cloud has cost advantages over that of staying on premise continues to be discussed in industry publications. Some industry analysts suggest that all things being equal, OpEx strategies should cost more than CapEx… but does it? Lets first briefly explore the definitions of the two strategies and then dig deeper into the numbers that layout the true cost of ownership (TCO) of moving to the cloud.

Microsoft has just published an in-depth vendor story on Archive360 titled “Intelligent information management ISV uses Azure to give customers fast, flexible insights at a lower cost.”

Healthcare providers are facing continually growing data storage requirements, a changing regulatory compliance environment and increasing numbers of data sources to manage. The obvious culprit of rising healthcare storage requirements is diagnostic imaging systems. Currently, imaging systems are creating over 600 million images per year in the U.S. alone.

With the recent ransomware attacks that have been in the headlines over the last year, many companies are reconsidering their data protection strategies to protect their company against these new, growing threats.

Prior to the availability of cloud archiving, companies were stuck with expensive, on premise archiving solutions mainly because they were the only game in town. The archiving software vendors focused on specific industries that required companies to archive data based on government regulatory requirements, for example the financial services industry with SEC and FINRA compliance requirements. Companies quickly discovered the downside of on premise archiving solutions; 1) they were expensive, and 2) they were complicated to maintain. Their main advantage was that your data was stored in your data center – you controlled your data.

Microsoft today announced the general availability of their archive tier, Microsoft Azure Archive Blob Storage, to go along with their Hot and Cool storage tiers. For Azure-based archiving and information governance applications, the Azure Archive Blob Storage tier will be a huge advance for records managers and information governance professionals looking for long term, inexpensive archive storage.