Best Enterprise Information Archiving Software
Enterprise information archiving (EIA) software is designed to assist in storing a company’s structured and unstructured original historical data. EIA software provides complete archives of business data across the board by incorporating unstructured data (for example, email messages and media files). Data can be stored on premises with local data servers, on cloud servers, or by using a hybrid of the two. These solutions are used throughout a business by any employee since all teams should be archiving their data for, at minimum, auditing purposes. EIA solutions are typically implemented and maintained by a company’s data team, and they can be used by companies of any size.
The main difference between EIA software and backup software is that EIA handles the original, historical data as opposed to a copy of that data.
To qualify for inclusion in the Enterprise Information Archiving category, a product must:
Best Enterprise Information Archiving Software At A Glance
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- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Google Vault is a solution designed to allow users to retain, hold, search, and export data to support their organizations archiving and eDiscovery needs.
- Computer Software
- Education Management
- 42% Enterprise
- 29% Small-Business
32,553,933 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Global Relay is the leading provider of fully compliant, cloud electronic communications archiving, messaging, supervision, and eDiscovery solutions for the global financial sector and other highly re
- Financial Services
- 40% Small-Business
- 33% Mid-Market
1,435 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Launched in the UK in 2003, Cryoserver has customers in 28 countries around the globe. It serves a large client base across all sectors, including financial, industrial and government. Cryoserver ema
- Information Technology and Services
- 52% Mid-Market
- 27% Enterprise
469 Twitter followers
- Overview
- Pros and Cons
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Odaseva delivers the strongest data security solution for enterprises running on Salesforce, safeguarding confidentiality and integrity of critical business information. The Odaseva Enterprise Data Se
- Financial Services
- Insurance
- 66% Enterprise
- 27% Mid-Market
525 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Vyapin Microsoft teams reporting tool is an efficient reporting solution for your Microsoft teams.
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 39% Mid-Market
- 36% Small-Business
98 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Mimecast Cloud Archive solution keeps multiple copies of every inbound, outbound and internal email, along with detailed meta-data and a copy of the email if it was changed by policy enforcement. Emai
- Financial Services
- 67% Mid-Market
- 20% Small-Business
18,482 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Veritas Enterprise Vault is designed to help automate retention management, classification and supervision, while simplifying search and eDiscovery over unstructured data.
- 44% Enterprise
- 38% Mid-Market
31,086 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Proofpoint Enterprise Archive is a cloud-based archiving solution that simplifies legal discovery, regulatory compliance, and end-user information access without the headaches of managing an archive i
- 58% Enterprise
- 42% Mid-Market
30,859 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
IBM's Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) is designed to help users manage their business information throughout its lifecycle.
- 46% Small-Business
- 31% Enterprise
710,979 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Oracle StorageTek offers solutions for archiving and data protection designed to provide a template for combining discrete components, from Oracle and participating third parties, to solve industry-sp
- 36% Mid-Market
- 36% Small-Business
824,470 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Archive Microsoft Teams channels, conversations, members, attachments, etc. Export Microsoft teams conversations and all other data for regulatory compliance.
- Assistant Professor
- 45% Mid-Market
- 36% Enterprise
98 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Secure mobile media preservation
- 60% Small-Business
- 20% Mid-Market
1,273 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Databasix is a cloud-based record management solution (RMS) for FIRE/EMS agencies. Our goal is to streamline data and records into one centralized system, accessible by any device with an internet con
- 90% Mid-Market
- 50% Small-Business
3 Twitter followers
- Overview
- Pros and Cons
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Flex Appliance moves beyond hyperconverged architectures and provides a unified NetBackup environment by making it simple to protect all your workloads and scale without increasing your hardware footp
- 38% Mid-Market
- 31% Small-Business
31,086 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Zix Information Archiving provides unified data archiving, streamlined communication, and increased efficiency across organizations. Message retention for all digital communications makes compliance a
- 54% Small-Business
- 46% Mid-Market
62,858 Twitter followers
Learn More About Enterprise Information Archiving Software
What is Enterprise Information Archiving Software?
Enterprise information archiving (EIA) software is primarily used to store structured and unstructured data of a business. Traditionally, companies primarily focused on storing structured data since it was easier to handle and integrate with various workflows and improved overall data management capabilities. This data would be stored on-premises. However, with the rise of unstructured data, it became increasingly difficult to store huge amounts of data without the right storage environment. This is where EIA steps in. EIA solutions ensure that companies have an option to store their unstructured data, along with other key features along with storage such as data retrieval and data archiving. The data can be stored in the public cloud, private cloud, or even hybrid cloud environments. Data is stored across multiple data centers owned by the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud among several others.
The internet boom along with the smartphone generation created a large amount of unstructured data in the form of short message service (SMS), video, chats, social media, and numerous other sources. These forms did not have any particular schema which made it very difficult to store such data files. Enterprises now had a large amount of unstructured data in the form of different content types such as files, website content, call recordings, file sharing, email retention but no proper way to store it. It is important to note that enterprise information archiving deals with the storage of historical, original, real-time data of a company. When original data is replicated and stored, it is called a data backup.
When people view storage, they usually picture servers and storage boxes hidden away in the back of an enterprise—not anymore. With the advent of cloud storage, companies can now store their data off-premises and in the cloud (public, private, or hybrid). What this translates for firms is that there is now a single place to store and save emails, files, instant messaging chats, and content types and ensure a smooth and simplified management process. What this means for customers is that their data is always available, safe, and ready to use as and when required. Data protection is one of the key focuses for EIA solutions.
As the amount of data keeps increasing, every enterprise needs to focus on strict regulatory compliance. Enterprise information archiving software helps firms to manage their information more easily, and ensure that all compliance standards are being met. EIA solutions also focus on retention management, to ensure against data loss issues, security breaches, and data corruption.
What are the Common Features of Enterprise Information Archiving Software?
The following are some core features within enterprise information archiving solutions that can help users in archiving data securely:
Archiving: Archiving is the most important and needed feature that this software provides. As companies expand their footprint across the globe, there is a growing need to have archive storage solutions for these enterprises that will ensure data safety. By using EIA software, companies have a single solution to manage archiving user communications, IMs, emails, videos, content, SMS, and several other data types. In addition, the software ensures emails of employees/externals are compliant. Email retention forms the core for several businesses as well.
Performance and accessibility: Users need access to their content. Ideally this data/content type needs to be found quickly without any possible lags. EIA software ensures that unstructured and structured data is not just continually stored, but can also be retrieved as per the user requirements. This helps increase performance efficiency, user satisfaction, and ensures that teams have access to quick, clean, and original real-time data. Especially when the users can cross tens of thousands of employees, the EIA software must ensure top-notch performance.
Electronic discovery: Also known as eDiscovery, this feature of EIA products focuses on delivering content on request. Content is requested across different teams such as legal firms, financial audit teams, and others. eDiscovery focuses on identifying, gathering, and presenting electronically stored information (such as enterprise information and archive storage) for legal proceedings. eDiscovery cannot be taken lightly and is one of the main reasons for the birth of enterprise information archive storage. It has significant ramifications as to how enterprises store and organize their data. For any enterprise, there will be litigation matters, lawsuits, or types of legal action where eDiscovery will play a major role. eDiscovery has a huge impact on content archival, content searching, storage system management, and even risk management.
Data retention: Another key benefit of EIA products is data retention. A data retention policy is defined as the policy that controls how the data is being saved for regulatory purposes. Companies can have simple or complex data retention policies because these policies would clarify how data is stored. Other information such as what data can be stored, or formatted, or even what kind of system holds this data is provided with data retention. EIA software has the feature of data retention since it works so closely with data.
Automation: Some enterprise archive solutions have built-in automation features to increase productivity and efficiency. Tasks such as setting timelines after which data needs to be archived, sending into the correct location, the need to create replicas, and several other features can be automated. Bringing in the element of automation into EIA software will help reduce any user errors and ensure all the data is compliant.
What are the Benefits of Enterprise Information Archiving Software?
Compliance with civil procedures and litigations: With data being available over numerous geographies, the law of the land will apply to several enterprises that wish to do business there. It gets extremely difficult to manage large amounts of data spread across different geographies that have different data retention laws, and this is where EIA solutions come in. EIA solutions ensure that consumer data is stored safely and securely and can only be accessed as per the users defined. It ensures that the laws are being followed and therefore the company can continue operations knowing their archived data is safe, secure, and compliant.
Increased operational efficiency: One of the key benefits of the software is that it increases operational efficiency across the entire organization. Having message and content compliance makes it easier for eDiscovery, data retention, regulatory compliance, and other statutory processes. Since all the original, real-time data is archived and can be retrieved via the software, it focuses on improving efficiency significantly. Users can have a single point source where they will be able to access their content and data that is archived. In addition, the software also ensures user access—which means making sure the original, historical data does not fall into the wrong hands.
Better data control: EIA software has the added benefit of policy controls. What this means is that the user of the software can ideally control which messages need to be live, which messages need to be archived, and for how long they need to be archived before automatic deletion.
Relevance classification: Storing data in the cloud does not mean dumping all data into a “cold storage” and forgetting about it. Rather, some EIA software have additional benefits such as message relevance classification. The benefit of relevance classification is that it allows users to archive their data as per their preference and relevance, and therefore these are extremely helpful in litigation matters, management requests, case analysis, and several other situations that might arise.
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.
