Data re-archival in IT application retirement scenario a case study

The prolific expansion of business operations globally, multi-channel operations and many such newer paradigms are driving voluminous growth for many businesses. This is resulting in tremendous data volume growth within supporting IT systems. Increased need for fact driven decision making and regulatory compliance requirements needs is driving the need for retention and storage of historical data for longer duration. Historical data being referred occasionally does not warrant storage using expensive database systems unlike transactional data. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is an emerging discipline within Information Technology that addresses this problem. Data Archival is a concept within ILM used to retain necessary data for reference by live applications, while preserving historical data. The challenges faced during the execution of a Data Archival project by a Fortune 500 organization, the methodology formulated and implemented to work-around the challenges are described in this case.