News
Princeton Softech's Cash on smart data archiving
- By Will Kilburn
- June 26, 2003
Whether it’s growth in the database or growth in the application, it’s the same thing,” said Lisa Cash (below), CEO at Princeton Softech, Princeton, N.J. “Web applications, CRM, ERP, vertical applications ... the amount of data that the organization accumulates just continues to skyrocket.”
 Adding to the data confusion, said Cash, are the many new laws that followed in the wake of several high-profile corporate meltdowns.
“You have all of these regulations now that come into play with regard to how long you have to keep the data,” she said. “[IT managers] feel like they’ve got to keep data forever. And financially, you just cannot do that.”
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To help solve the problem of rapid data growth, Princeton Softech has released Version 1.3 of Archive for Servers ClarifyCRM Edition. The product removes complete sets of seldom-referenced customer data from CRM databases and then archives it so that the data remains accessible by customer service reps whenever they need it.
Financial pressures are also forcing companies to look for non-traditional solutions to taming vast amounts of data, continued Cash.
“The way that people solved the problem before is that they threw more hardware at it. So if the performance of your application is degrading, what do you do? You throw another box at it,” she said. “At one point in time, that was OK, but there’s not one CIO that I’ve run into whose budget is increasing at the same rate that data growth is occurring. It forces them to look for an alternative.”
But any alternative, Cash said, must include an understanding of the relative importance of each piece of data.
“We believe that data should be treated and stored based on its value to the enterprise. Your business-critical data absolutely belongs in that production environment,” said Cash. “Any other data that you are keeping for retention policy purposes needs to be moved off the production environment — you need to store it more cost-effectively on disk, tape, optical devices, etc., anything out of that production environment is going to be more cost-effective.”
It is in the process of moving that data to and from that environment, Cash said, where Archive for Servers provides value to its users.
“We delete that data from the production database, but you still have the ability to selectively restore it,” said Cash. “You don’t have to bring it all back.”
Princeton Softech
www.princetonsoftech.com