Storage Challenges

Organisations and their IT departments must accommodate numerous business drivers which are further increasing the complexity and cost of managing and storing information, documents and content.

Growth in Fixed Content
Compliance & Corporate Governance
Information Lifecycle Management
Immediate Response Times
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Affordable Magnetic Disk Media

SoftCo Storlife Storage Challenges

Growth in Fixed Content

Organisations have made significant investments in their storage infrastructure in order to keep up with the exponential growth in 'fixed content'. According to ESG research, digital files are growing in volume at annual rate of 92% and now comprise 51% of stored data. IT departments are seeking to leverage this investment with a hardware-independent policy to growing requirements. Using SoftCo Storlife, companies have the visibility to manage not only the supply of, but also the demand for storage independent of hardware vendors.

Compliance & Corporate Governance

Protecting fixed content and documents such as financial or medical records is prerequisite for complying with statutory regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17a-4 and the European Data Directive. Businesses need to secure all critical information and provide multiple levels of access control to ensure that only authorised individuals or applications gain access to protected data stored. Businesses now must be able to quickly locate, retrieve, authenticate and dispose of information to avoid the risk of non-compliance and the resulting heavy fines and penalties.

Information Lifecycle Management

Rapid content growth is increasing the complexity and maintenance overhead in storing and managing information. Business content has a finite lifetime, after which point it can be of little or no value, consuming more and more valuable storage space. By understanding what business information is important for regulatory compliance, the appropriate classification and policies can be put in place to manage the capture, indexing, archiving, retrieval, retention and ultimately end-of-life disposal of information.

Immediate Response Times

Whenever content is located across multiple applications or is held in numerous onsite and offsite storage facilities, access to this information can be unacceptably slow. Traditional optical and tape storage technologies have struggled to respond to the changing nature of content and document archiving. In contrast SoftCo Storlife delivers archived documents to business users securely and in real-time.

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Organisations must eliminate the risk of losing important content due to system failures or accidents and protect sensitive information, documents and records from being tampered with or compromised in any way. IT departments want storage solutions with built-in backup and DR capabilities that allow for fast and seamless replication to hot stand-by servers or offsite storage facilities on a scheduled basis.

Affordable Magnetic Disk Media

The dramatic and continuing decline in the price of magnetic disks and the ability to combine hardware-independent, lower cost high speed disk storage with the Write Once Read Many (WORM) capabilities of CAS has caused a fundamental shift from optical to magnetic disk storage. The cost per gigabit of magnetic disk media is now less than optical media, including Ultra Density Optical (UDO) disk which, combined with the real-time performance of CAS, has created a growing demand for CAS technology. Utilising CAS technology, fixed content has enhanced data integrity and availability as it is stored on resilient magnetic disks with built-in error correction capabilities, rather than on tapes or optical disks which are susceptible to media corruption over time.