3 Key Questions for Enterprise Archiving Vendors

Sometimes it is easier to figure out why things fail, rather than trying to figure out why things succeed. Maybe because hindsight is 20/20 or because it is hard to predict where the saturation point meets the tipping point. Whatever the reason, we can't help but delve deeper into the psyche of failure in an effort to capitalize and reap success.

In today's installment of Why Things Fail, we take a closer look at the enterprise archiving and three key questions you need to ask before choosing a solution to implement.

eRecords Management Growing At a Fast Pace

eRecords management, for all our nit picking and analysis, is still a fairly new process. It's large, kind of awkward and growing rapidly. Trying to manage it is hard enough, but in order to be effective it needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the evolving archiving demands, including regulatory compliance, search and discovery and be able to scale itself to manage, store and search thousands of documents very quickly.

Because every company is different — some are big, some small; some are proactive in their approach to managing data, some reactive — it's hard to know what strategy will be effective and successful.

Three Key Questions to Ask

In fact, ZL Technologies, an enterprise archiving solutions company, estimates that 90% of large enterprise archiving projects fail.

So what can we do? First, learn the breaking points of enterprise archiving. Knowing the right questions to ask, as well understanding the right answers is key.

Storage is only one component of archiving. Finding what is stored is more important. To assess the search capabilities of archiving solution, here are three key questions ZL Technolgoies recommends you ask vendors:

1. How fast is the search across all mailboxes?

The demands of eDiscovery and the rapid growth of that industry have made the ability to search across mailboxes quickly and effectively critical to the search and discovery process. Limited custodian searches can hinder the approach and miss crucial information.

Look for search-all-mailboxes capability, which can search emails and related documents more in-depth and help reduce the chances of inadvertent waiver of privilege.

2. How accurate is the search?

Speedy searches are only successful if they discover useful information. Search capabilities such as proximity search (finding a word within n words of another) are critically important to reduce false positives.

3. Does the archive’s search engine have a future?

The life of a search engine plays a critical factor in the success of the archive. Data migration is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Make sure that the search engine used has enough power and flexibility to sustain itself.

Don't Forget Cost and Support

ZL Technologies recommends asking these questions, but it's just as important to assess the cost of ownership and quality of support of a solution, as well.

Choosing the archiving solution that makes sense for your size, structure and situation is a fail-safe way to avoid the pitfalls of enterprise archiving.

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Tags: archive solutions, archiving, enterprise cms, enterprise search, records management, zl technologies

Sometimes it is easier to figure out why things fail, rather than trying to figure out why things succeed. Maybe because hindsight is 20/20 or because it is hard to predict where the saturation point meets the tipping point. Whatever the reason, we can't help but delve deeper into the psyche of failure in an effort to capitalize and reap success.

In today's installment of Why Things Fail, we take a closer look at the enterprise archiving and three key questions you need to ask before choosing a solution to implement.