A new survey showed this week that while archiving technology continues to be more prevalent in the data center, regulatory compliance is no longer the number one driver to adopt new archiving equipment and software.
A survey sponsored by BridgeHead Software surveyed 350 IT managers about their archiving preferences and practices.
Respondents said the No. 1 driver behind archiving is disaster recovery and business continuity, followed by data growth. Regulatory compliance was third on the list of major drivers.
The survey also found that the preference for tape as an archiving media grew over the last year, a potentially troubling trend if those businesses are actually using tape backup as an archiving method, according to BridgeHead's chief executive.
"One area of potential concern is that the high response for 'archiving' with tape might actually come from IT departments continuing to use tape-based backups as their strategy for long-term data retention," said Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software. "While the removability and relatively long lifecycle of tape lends itself to data archiving, the use of backup software is a major mismatch. Backup simply doesn't have the granular data management functionality to address compliant data-level retention, destruction, access control or authentication needs over long periods."
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