Backup, Continuity, And Archiving Technologies — What's The Difference?

By Mike Pagani, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist, Smarsh

The short answer to the question posed in the title above is: “Quite a bit actually.”

In the age of Big Data and cloud storage, organizations of all sizes now have the means to easily and affordably retain copies of just about anything and everything from a data perspective. However, some critical use cases, especially in regulated industries, require more than just the ability to save everything reliably, bring it all back online quickly in case of a disaster, or run on a duplicate copy to stay up if that is a requirement.

In my experience as an IT veteran of over 25 years, I’ve found that the differences between backups, continuity, and archiving solutions are not always understood and can be particularly confusing to discern on the surface. When asked to delineate between these technologies, I typically explain that the key difference boils down to one of intelligence.

While backup addresses retention, and continuity addresses retention plus uptime, archiving is a specialized additional service that provides policy-driven supervision capabilities on the front end and smart search capabilities on the back end for a selective set of information. Archived information is stored in an indexed, “search ready” state that delivers significant paybacks in terms of saving time, resources and money when preparing and responding to time-sensitive and potentially damaging situations like litigation or regulatory audits and examinations.

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