Best Enterprise Information Archiving Software

What is Enterprise Information Archiving Software?

What are the Common Features of Enterprise Information Archiving Software?

What are the Benefits of Enterprise Information Archiving Software?

Who Uses Enterprise Information Archiving Software?

The end users of the enterprise information archiving solution will depend on the functionality that is required—whether it is IT-specific, legal, audit purposes, among several others.

IT teams: The IT team of any organization will be the key users of this software. The IT team will use the software for several purposes which include storage and retrieval of files, content, email, and chats. As the requests from different functions in the organization come to the IT team to process, they will deep dive into the software and ensure that all files are not just readily accessible, but also safe and secure.

Legal teams: One of the biggest users of EIA solutions are company legal teams. Legal teams will focus on compliance and statutory rules for the company and therefore the team would use the software to answer any requests that might come up.

Employees: Employees can also use the software as per their access since they would need to have access to their content on their mobile devices. Being able to access archived emails and chats as required is a huge help for employees across any organization.

Senior leadership teams (SLT): Since this software works closely with confidential company data, senior leaders and team members can use this software to identify who can or cannot have access to different sections of the data. SLTs will also be able to convey to the rest of the organization in regards to information security to define it for company employees.

What are the Alternatives to Enterprise Information Archiving Software?

Alternatives to enterprise information archiving solutions can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:

Email archiving software: Email archiving is a key part of the enterprise information archiving, focusing specifically on emails. This software ensures that complete email transactions are archived carefully. Email archiving software primarily focuses on compressing and storing emails older than a predetermined date. The aim of this is to reference these emails at a later date as and when required. One of the main benefits is that it does not need much storage since it is specifically for emails. Tons of conversations within an organization happen primarily over email—employee conversations, sales conversations, company conversations, among others. Email history can be preserved. For companies that only want to archive their emails, this is a great option over enterprise information archiving.

Online backup software: Backup and archiving are different in terms of the data being stored. Backup is a very secure method to store data over the internet. The biggest advantage of this software over EIA solutions is that the former deals with copies of the data and can be replicated to ensure complete backup. EIA however, deals with original, real-time, and historical data, and if lost could be very hard to recover.

SaaS backup software: SaaS backup helps to back up data within the SaaS solution itself. These tools work with CRMs, email, and instant messaging to backup any type of SaaS application. This software too primarily aims at ensuring no data loss and keeping the data secure in case of any business interruption or calamity.

Challenges with Enterprise Information Archiving Software

Enterprise information archiving solutions can come with their own set of challenges. 

Growing number of data types: Data is continuously growing and new formats are being added to the data world quite frequently. As the types of data increase, it becomes harder for enterprises to manage and control all this data. In addition, the EIA software may not be well equipped to handle new types of data which could be a big challenge for software usage. 

Storage capacity: In unstructured data, it’s important to consider millions of data points that could be created even in a single day. Storing such large amounts of data is no easy task and can potentially be a huge challenge for the software. The sheer volume of the data of enterprises from daily activities, numerous emails, constant slacks, and IM pings could cause the software to slow down and have archival issues. It is necessary to ensure that the backup or hardware solution/cloud offering can handle such enormous amounts of original data.

Employee resistance: Knowing that every single ping, IM, email, message, video content, and text message is being stored is quite scary. Companies can expect to face some backlash from their employees who might agree to store some data, but not all of it. The software might not have a general acceptance across the company since privacy lines might be crossed, and hence this could pose a challenge to software implementation.

Archiving speed: When data is being stored in its format over the cloud (which would need good internet connectivity), the huge volume of data could easily slow down the software causing severe lags. Software crashes could even cause loss of data, which defeats the purpose of installing this software. Archiving data is a time-intensive process, and IT teams would need to work closely to set standard procedures and settings to ensure that this is done continuously without any faults.

How to Buy Enterprise Information Archiving Software

Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Enterprise Information Archiving Software

When choosing an enterprise information archiving solution, the first and key thing to focus on is to ensure that the software helps manage information archives and improves productivity and retention support. These are the basic and most important features that almost all products need to have. Some of the important questions to be asked as a buyer include:

• Is cloud storage safe and secure? Does it have encryption capabilities?
• Are copies of my data available, and are these replicates being used as a backup of my data?
• Can my team and all employees (with user access) to the software access data archives when required?
• Is there support provided by the vendor? What are the package options available?
• Does the software ensure that my data is compliant with the laws of the land, and follows statutory rules and regulations?
• Features vs affordability—which one is more important for my organization?
• Is the enterprise information archiving software that I am choosing compatible with my other systems?

Answering these questions might be difficult, however, they provide a strong base to build the long list. Customers can use reviews here at G2.com as a guide to move forward with the selection of enterprise information archiving software.

Compare Enterprise Information Archiving Software Products

Create a long list

In this step, buyers should keep their options open to consider the full range of products. Buyers have the freedom to explore numerous offerings that the EIA software market has. In addition, this is the main step to evaluate the answers to the above questions. The long list can be made much more concise and smaller by addressing the questions above.

Create a short list

Buyers can make much more granular comparisons on this step. In addition to this, buyers can use the G2 reviews to further narrow this list down. G2’s comparison feature where buyers can compare between two products is a useful tool to create the short list.

Conduct demos

Once the list has been reduced to a couple of vendors, buyers may begin to request a demo. During the demo, buyers should seek out information related to their non-negotiable terms. This is the best stage where the buyer can delve more deeply into understanding how secure their archived information will be, the various features that the software provides, different complaint requests, and security concerns can be addressed here as well. Other queries such as after-service support, staff training, and other additional features can be asked here.

Selection of Enterprise Information Archiving Software

Choose a selection team

Choosing the right team to work together to decide the best software is a critical part of the process. This team will be in charge of overseeing the entire process—from selection to implementation, as well as after implementation feedback. The team should include a mix of different personas who have the required skills, interests, and time. Some roles include IT admins (who would work on the software), cloud engineers (who would assess the cloud storage requirements), legal team executives, and key leads from different teams.

Negotiation

Enquiring about pricing is the key decision that could make or break a deal. Identifying how the pricing is done is a good start. For example, it can focus on the number of mailboxes or email data volume, the number of IMs being sent, or the number of users using the IM. Having a good understanding of how pricing would work is key for negotiation. A buyer can choose to negotiate to trim costs. The buyer needs to note that if in the future there is a requirement for scaling cloud archive storage as the company grows, there would be additional costs. Keeping such factors in mind will help the buyer put forward better negotiation tactics and ensure the features that matter are part of the deal.

Final decision

Once all the steps are complete, the final decision is made weighing all factors and scenarios. Having a trial run of the software is a good place to start. A small group of IT admins can use the software to see if there are viable benefits and pass on their views to the team making the final decision.