– Continuation –
Part 2 of the series of articles: Intelligent controls are becoming the new focus
In the first part of our two-part series of articles, we concentrated on changes over time. As we stated there, archiving has experienced rapid change, just like all other areas in IT. The long storage periods, as well as the massive increase in the length of life-cycles for archiving systems this involves, means that archiving solutions are subject to significantly higher demands in terms of their future viability.
Starting with secure storage through management, the focus has now shifted onto the automation and control of processes. We will take a closer look at these changes below.
Today, innovative archiving solutions use automated, intelligent concepts for controlling information in the “right” way. This means that nowadays, after storage and management, controlling processes are the most important thing in information management.
The central idea is that the value of information can be recognized automatically using a classification of the content, after which the information can be controlled automatically. In the automated classification of data, each item is typically assigned one or more document classes, each of which has a defined quantity of metadata, attributes or tags.
In addition to earlier control mechanisms, which are mainly based on technical attributes (name, size, age, type), modern archiving systems also use a subject-based level. In this regard, document classes can be of a specialist nature, such as contracts, minutes, project reports, as well as having subject-based attributes such as levels of confidentiality.
In this way, control on a technical level shifted to control on a logical, content-based level. While, in the past, the focus of archiving was mainly on the passive aspects of information management such as orderly management or audit-proof storage, today it is on controlling information flows, the harmonizing processes and ensuring that information is handled in the right way.
The focus has shifted from the secure storage of information to the automation and control of processes via efficient management. Today, important parts of early archiving solutions are performed by modern storage infrastructures and have therefore been subject to a high degree of commodification.
Automated classification is absolutely essential for efficiently handling growing volumes of data. Furthermore, it taps into the value of information and its specific qualities, controlling the right way to handle it in the future.
As well as automatic classification, automated tagging and metadata enrichment is opening up new areas of application and creating efficiency potential. Automated document routing, automated processing as well as significantly improved search options are important areas of application in this regard.
Every archiving strategy must be capable of performing joint archiving using a hybrid approach that consists of cloud services and on-premises applications. The fragmentation of IT through the mixing of cloud services with on-premises applications must not lead to the recurrence of isolated solutions and silos in archiving.
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