BANGALORE, INDIA: Does growth always signify profit? Not necessarily. This would be the immediate answer from companies who have to deal with huge data growth. Today, data is growing at 60 percent each year, as per industry estimates.

Suganthi Shivkumar, MD, South Asia, Informatica, says: “Data accumulates in various business applications, including CRM and ERP systems. Most of these data are inactive and costing companies a bundle. When the size of a database increases, the time and effort required to perform database maintenance tasks, such as back-up, recovery, replication, and upgrades, grows exponentially.”

Suganthi in an interview with Deepa Damodaran, CIOL, talks on how database archiving can curb the growing data. Excerpts:

CIOL: How adversely will be a company effected because of data growth?

Suganthi Shivkumar: To comply with industry and government regulations, IT organization must retain inactive data longer, sometimes more than 10 years, thus increasing data volumes.

As the amount of data increases, the performance of applications and databases decreases. They become harder to tune. Declining performance requires more CPUs, more storage, and more frequent software upgrades, and more costs.

Application performance degradation hurts everyone. End users suffer longer response times, the organizations IT staff struggles to meet service level agreements. And without reliable applications, the business lacks the agility to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace.

CIOL: So what can be done to control this?

Suganthi: Data archiving is the answer to questions that often arise in every Indian enterprise, like - How can they manage data growth in their production environment? How can they improve application performance, safely retire legacy applications, and support regulatory compliance? And how can they minimize IT costs?

Database archiving is essentially a technology that allows archiving and removing of data that is intermittently accessed, storing it on various storage mediums, while still providing easy access to it.

One of the priorities with data archiving is to relocate inactive data, taking it out of the database but maintain accessibility to it. However, as data will continue to grow, archive cycles have to be carried out at regular intervals. These cycles can be run on demand as well.

Data archiving is important for Indian enterprises as it helps cut growing storage costs and eliminate future spending on additional storage. Archiving also helps to reduce maintenance and compliance work among numerous other benefits.

However, Indian companies have to understand that archiving is not a one-time fix or a band aid which is used to solve a problem and is later forgotten. Archiving is an ongoing, continuous solution.

CIOL: In future do you see database archiving moving over to cloud?

Suganthi: Roughly 30-40 percent of the estimated $800 million e-mail archiving market has already moved to the cloud.  There is no reason to assume that database archiving won’t head in that direction as well. It has already made a move into this direction. 

Fundamentally, the cloud provides an incredibly cost effective way to retain large amounts of infrequently accessed data for long periods of time. By moving inactive data to the cloud, you optimize your on-premise resources to focus on the data that’s most critical to driving your business.