When you consider the costs of data growth, why are businesses so reluctant to retire data? If data in your system or application is no longer used or relevant, why keep it? One answer would be to archive the data, but to do so you will have to overcome challenges and risks, many of which are handled by Optim data management.

1. Archiving Data with IBM Optim Solutions
When you consider the costs of data growth, why are businesses so reluctant to retire data? If data in your system
or application is no longer used or relevant, why keep it? One answer would be to archive the data, but to do so
you will have to overcome challenges and risks, many of which are handled by Optim data management.
Most applications can adequately update and validate data, but what about inactive data? Only a select amount of
applications provide a way to safely retire data, and even if the data is safely retired, it can be challenging retain
access. Regulations in almost any industry also require that data remain accessible after retirement. Also, in most
cases, it is necessary that the data not only be accessible, but your business must also be able to restore that same
data to its original condition, application, system, etc.
Another challenge in archiving data is maintaining the relationship of the data. If a single set of information is
referenced in multiple databases, it must be retired with those relations intact. If the data is simple, then creating
subsets is relatively simple as well. However, it is rarely the case that the data is simple. With the technology
running today’s systems, most applications use complex configurations of data - e.g., some data consists of
hundreds of recursive, bi-directional, and other relationships.
In order to properly archive data, you will software that can do the following:
 Process various types of data relationships – e.g., intricate relationship cycles. (This also includes
parent-child relationships.)
 Maintain integrity: during any process, there must be no adverse effect to the integrity of the data –
e.g., no orphaned or corrupt data.

During the archive process, many businesses are concerned that the data they remove may still be needed, or
even worse, data may inadvertently become corrupted in the process. Again, these reasons and the challenges
mentioned above are some of the reasons many businesses eat the cost and do not retire data.
Some businesses consider developing in-house software to archive the retired data; however, spending the time
and resources developing and designing such a system is a huge cost. Not only would the cost be significant in
something so labor intensive, but a business would also have to maintain that system as applications and data
continue to grow and change.
Instead of developing a system yourself or eating the cost, it makes sense to use software that already exists. IBM
Optim application decommissioning (i.e., data archiving) software was created to save time and resources in
archiving data. This same software also addresses each of the challenges mentioned above; it handles complex
relationships, reduces costs, regulates data, retains access, etc. Though the challenges of properly archiving data
are numerous and can seem overwhelming, IBM Optim Solutions provides a software that happens to be simple
and easy to use; archiving data is no longer as difficult as it once was.
Read more about : data growth solution & IBM Optim Decommissioning