What is archiving?
When archiving electronic documents, they are moved out of the working repository of the document management system. In most cases they are moved to a specialised and/or less accessible archiving system.
As an archive is a long-term solution, integrity, and accessibility of the documents is key. Therefore, as part of the archiving process, the documents and their corresponding structure and metadata are often transformed and prepared for future access.
The main driver for archiving is to meet regulatory requirements for long-term storage and retrieval of critical data. Decommissioning of the document management system is another scenario. The documents that are no longer in actively use are stored in the archive, rather than moving everything to the new system. Typically, the archive process does not require significant data enrichment and is therefore considerably less costly.
In both cases, moving legacy data to an archive, will de-clutter the document management system and make day-to-day use easier. Furthermore, data in the archive is looked after with a focus on long-term storage and accessibility considering factors like like ‘shelf-life’, data integrity and format retention are important
It is a common misconception that archiving is merely ‘dumping stuff on a file-share’. To meet regulatory or legal requirements, the documents must be retrievable and accessible. Therefore, it is necessary to define some degree of structure. Similarly, access control and retention time is often defined for archived documents.
Although frightening to some, the archiving process is also a good opportunity to assess your data. Some data may be outdated and/or obsolete and should simply be deleted, rather than archived.
How can Strator help?
The task of selecting and preparing documents for transfer to the archive, can be an overwhelming task. Our experienced consultants, best practices, and tools for automation, can make your archiving tasks and projects a lot more manageable.