From Saving Costs to Driving Business Value and Compliance: Understanding the Difference Between File Archiving and Enterprise Content Archiving
Modern organizations face an explosion of data growth and stricter information retention requirements. By 2025 the global “datasphere” is projected to reach 175 zettabytes, making it infeasible to keep all data on expensive primary storage indefinitely. At the same time, regulations across industries demand that certain records be retained and readily available for years. Archiving – the long-term preservation of infrequently used data – has thus become a cornerstone of both IT strategy and information governance. It ensures that data no longer needed for daily operations is migrated to cost-effective storage yet remains accessible for future reference or compliance audits. Moreover, archiving is not the same as data backup: backups protect current data for short-term recovery, whereas archives preserve historical data for long-term retention and retrieval. Relying on backups to serve as archives can be inefficient – repeatedly backing up static, unchanging data wastes time and storage resources.
- By Catalin Paunescu
- 12 Minute Read
Introduction
Organizations must implement dedicated archiving processes to control storage costs, meet regulatory obligations, and enable knowledge reuse. Analyst studies show that as much as 70% of unstructured data becomes “stale” within 90 days of its creation. Without proper archiving, IT environments become bloated with inactive data, lengthening backup windows and increasing operational risk. Effective archiving addresses this by offloading inactive information to lower-cost storage while retaining the ability to quickly search and retrieve it when needed. In essence, a solid archiving strategy balances cost optimization with information governance – safeguarding compliance, simplifying data management, and even enhancing productivity by enabling faster discovery of needed information.
There are two fundamental approaches to archiving that organizations may adopt: file archiving and enterprise content archiving. File archiving focuses on the technical storage of inactive files, often as an IT storage management task, whereas enterprise content archiving takes a broader view of information as a strategic asset – incorporating metadata, compliance, and integration with business processes. This whitepaper explores the distinctions between these approaches, their use cases, and outcomes, drawing on industry analyst insights, vendor expertise, and real-world considerations. It will also introduce the SEAL platform as a unified solution for enterprise information archiving and illustrate how SEAL’s capabilities (both on-premises and as a cloud service) address business and compliance needs.
Understanding File Archiving
File archiving is the practice of moving inactive or seldom-used files from primary storage to a secondary, cheaper storage tier for long-term retention. The goal is to reduce the volume of data on expensive, high-performance storage systems without deleting the data outright. In a typical file archiving operation, files that have not been accessed or modified within a certain period (e.g. 90 days or 1 year) are identified and migrated to an archive repository – which could be a lower-cost disk array, object storage, tape library, or cloud storage service. The archived files remain available for quick retrieval, but they no longer consume space on the primary storage. Often, the archiving system leaves behind small stub files or placeholders on the original file system to point users or applications to the archived copy. When a user tries to open an archived file, the system seamlessly recalls it from the archive storage, usually with minimal delay. This way, file archiving can be largely transparent to end-users – they still see the file in its original location, even though it resides on a different storage tier.
From a technical operation standpoint, file archiving solutions provide policies and tools to automate this tiering of data. Administrators can define rules based on file age, size, or type to determine what gets archived. Advanced solutions may offer indexing of file metadata (and sometimes content) at the time of archiving, so that archived items can be searched and retrieved easily in the future. In many cases, archived files are also compressed or deduplicated to save additional space. Reports and dashboards typically show how much primary storage has been freed and other metrics like compression ratios, helping IT quantify the benefits. In short, file archiving functions as a form of storage lifecycle management – periodically offloading “cold” data to appropriate archive storage and enabling recall when needed.
Use Cases
File archiving is primarily driven by IT infrastructure needs. Common use cases include:
- Storage Optimization: Offloading rarely accessed files (old project documents, logs, multimedia, etc.) from expensive SAN/NAS storage to cheaper media. This frees up primary storage capacity for active data and delays the need to purchase additional storage. Many organizations find that a majority of their file server data is cold (one study found ~70% of data goes stale within 3 months, so archiving that stale data can significantly reduce storage costs.
- Backup Reduction: Removing static, inactive files from the daily/weekly backup cycle. Archived files that reside on a separate tier can be backed up on a lighter schedule or not at all (if the archive storage is itself resilient), which means backup windows become shorter and backup storage requirements shrink. Conversely, if old data is left mixed with active data, backup systems will keep copying that unchanging data repeatedly – wasting time and space. By archiving it, IT can focus backups on truly active data, improving overall backup performance and cost.
- System Performance: In environments like file servers or SharePoint sites, a huge number of files can impact indexing and response times. Archiving older files can improve the performance of the primary system (for example, a file share with 1 million files will list directory contents faster after archival of half of them). It also makes tasks like virus scans or replication more efficient, since there’s less data to process.
- Extended Retention for Reference: Sometimes organizations want to keep historical files for reference or compliance, but don’t need them readily available in production. File archiving provides a middle ground – the files are retained in a secure archive and can be retrieved if necessary (for an audit, or to satisfy a business query), without cluttering active storage. For instance, an engineering firm might archive project documents from a completed project; years later, if a question arises, they can retrieve those files from the archive.
Outcomes
The immediate outcome of file archiving is cost savings and operational efficiency. By transferring inactive data from high-cost primary storage to low-cost storage, organizations significantly reduce their storage expenses. They also reclaim space on primary systems, allowing room for new data growth without constantly expanding the primary storage infrastructure. Another benefit is that with less data on primary storage, ongoing IT operations – backups, snapshots, replication, etc. – become faster and more manageable. In essence, file archiving lets IT do “more with less” by fitting a growing data set into a fixed (or modestly growing) primary storage footprint.
File archiving can also contribute to compliance in a limited sense. For example, archived files can be kept for specified retention periods and protected from deletion. Many file archiving products support features like write-once-read-many (WORM) storage or immutable archives, and they retain file metadata (timestamps, owners) to ensure records remain unaltered. However, file system archiving alone has limitations when it comes to meeting rigorous compliance and e-discovery demands. Typically, file archiving systems operate at the infrastructure level and may lack the richer context (such as email threading, document classifications, or case management features) that legal or governance teams require. As we’ll discuss next, enterprise content archiving builds upon the foundation of archiving but adds layers of intelligence, metadata, and integration to serve strategic business and compliance needs.
Understanding Enterprise Content Archiving
Enterprise content archiving refers to a holistic approach for preserving and managing a wide range of enterprise information – emails, documents, instant messages, records, and other content – in a unified archive for compliance, governance, and business value. Enterprise information archiving solutions combine tools for archiving the unstructured content (files, documents, emails, audio-video files, medical images, as well as other business content types like SharePoint documents or content generated by business applications such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, SuccessFactors, core-banking, core-insurance, etc., along with the associated metadata (attributes describing the unstructured content). In other words, it’s not just about moving old files to cheaper storage; it’s about capturing all important content across the organization, indexing it with metadata, and managing its lifecycle (retention, discovery, disposal) in alignment with regulatory and business requirements.
Where file archiving is mostly an IT storage tactic, enterprise content archiving is a strategic information governance initiative. An enterprise content archiving platform will typically ingest content from multiple sources (email servers, file shares, collaboration platforms, messaging apps, business applications, etc.), assign rich metadata and classification tags to each item, and store it in a centralized repository that is secure, tamper-evident, and searchable. The archive acts as a system of record for the organization’s knowledge and communications. For example, a policy might be set to archive every inbound and outbound email and retain it for 7 years, or to capture finalized documents from an ERP or CRM system (such as invoices from SAP or customer communications from Salesforce) into the archive. Unlike a simple file archive, an enterprise content archive preserves the context of information – who sent an email, which client a document relates to, what metadata (e.g. document type, department, case number) is associated – enabling advanced retrieval and analysis. Users (like compliance officers, legal counsel, or knowledge workers) can then perform powerful searches across the archive – by keywords, metadata filters, date ranges, authors, etc. – to find relevant information quickly. This is invaluable for e-discovery and internal investigations, where an organization might need to collect all communications about a certain topic or involving a particular employee. In fact, a robust enterprise archive “simplifies legal discovery, regulatory compliance and data access” by providing centralized, indexed storage of enterprise content.
Key Capabilities:
Enterprise content archiving solutions usually offer a feature set far beyond basic storage. These often include:
- Retention Management and Compliance Policies: The ability to define how long different categories of content should be retained (and when they should be disposed of). For example, financial records might be set to expire after 10 years unless on legal hold. The archive enforces these rules uniformly, helping organizations meet data retention regulations and mandates. Importantly, content in the archive can be frozen under legal hold to prevent deletion when litigation is anticipated.
- Content Indexing and Search: All archived items are indexed (including the full text of documents and emails), enabling rapid search and retrieval. Users can perform Google-like searches or use specific parameters (such as “find all emails from Person X in 2019 with attachment PDF”). This addresses a major limitation of traditional archiving – instead of having “limited accessibility and search capabilities,” the archive provides rich discovery tools. Many platforms also support e-discovery workflows like tagging, export, and review of search results for legal proceedings.
- Metadata Management and Classification: Beyond system metadata, enterprise archives often integrate with classification systems or allow custom (business) metadata. For instance, documents might be tagged by project, sensitivity level, or record category. Such metadata helps integrate the archive with records management programs – i.e., applying a file plan or taxonomy to archived content. The archive can thus serve as an electronic records management system (ERMS), supporting controlled disposition (deletion) of records and providing audit trails of all actions.
- Deduplication and Storage Optimization: Given the archive is aggregating data enterprise-wide, it often implements content deduplication and compression to minimize storage needs. This means if the same object (document, email, etc.) appears multiple times, only one copy is archived with references, saving space.
- Security and Access Controls: Enterprise archives are built with security in mind, since they contain sensitive and often regulated data. They usually offer role-based access control (so, for example, only compliance officers or admins can search across all data, while end-users might only access their own archived emails). Audit logs are maintained for every access or retrieval, providing a chain of custody for compliance. Many archives support encryption of archived data and integrity checks (to detect tampering). Modern cloud-based archives even use immutable storage options to ensure data cannot be altered or deleted outside of policy. All of this ensures the archive is a secure, trusted repository of the organization’s information.
- Integration with Business Applications: A hallmark of enterprise content archiving is that it integrates with the systems that generate or use content. This could mean out-of-the-box connectors for email servers (Exchange / Outlook, Office 365), for file systems, for collaboration tools (SharePoint, Teams), and for enterprise applications like ERP, CRM, HCM, core banking systems, etc. Such integration allows automatic capture of content from these sources into the archive without user intervention. It also means that users can sometimes access archived content directly from their familiar interfaces – for example, retrieving an archived email from within Outlook, or an archived invoice from within the SAP interface – because the archive plugs into those environments. Enterprise archives increasingly offer APIs and standards (e.g. CMIS – Content Management Interoperability Services) so they can embed in business processes and even act as a back-end for content management applications.
Use Cases:
The drivers for enterprise content archiving are often compliance, legal preparedness, and enterprise knowledge management:
- Regulatory Compliance and Audit Readiness: In regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government, etc.), there are strict rules on preserving communications and records. A compliance archive ensures the organization can meet data retention mandates and produce records on demand for regulators. For example, SEC Rule 17a-4 requires broker-dealers to retain business communications (emails, IMs) for specified periods. A content archiving solution can automatically capture all those communications and retain them in an unalterable form. When an audit or inquiry comes, the firm can quickly search and provide the requested data. This not only avoids fines but also demonstrates good faith compliance.
- E-Discovery and Legal Hold: In the event of litigation or investigations, companies need to find relevant emails, documents, chat logs, etc., out of millions of records – often under tight deadlines. Enterprise archives excel at this by providing centralized, indexed data that can be queried and exported for legal review. Features like legal hold ensure that once data is marked for a case, it will not be purged. This greatly reduces the cost and time of e-discovery compared to manual ad hoc searches across disparate systems. So, traditional file archiving methods often had limited search and accessibility, whereas modern compliance archiving makes e-discovery far simpler and more reliable.
- Records Management and Governance: Many organizations have policies for information governance – deciding what information to keep and for how long. Enterprise archiving platforms often serve as the execution arm for these policies, especially for unstructured content. They can implement a corporate retention schedule (for example, HR records 7 years, contracts 10 years, emails 5 years, etc.) in an automated way. The archive then acts as the official records repository, ensuring that when data is no longer needed (and not under any hold), it is disposed of in a controlled, auditable fashion. This mitigates the risks of over-retention (keeping data longer than necessary, which can be a liability in lawsuits or a privacy risk under laws like GDPR).
- Storage Consolidation and Legacy Data Management: Over years, companies might accumulate content in old systems (outdated document management systems, legacy email servers, old file shares). Enterprise archiving provides a path to consolidate and modernize that content. For instance, if retiring a legacy ECM system, its documents can be migrated into the archive for long-term preservation. The archive thus becomes a unified content repository for the enterprise, breaking down silos. It’s not just a static vault; users can continue to search and access this legacy content via the archive interface, extending its useful life. This use case often goes hand-in-hand with digital transformation initiatives – sometimes called “content modernization” or “enterprise application decommissioning,” where the archive is the target to store data from systems that are being phased out.
- Knowledge Retention and Business Productivity: Beyond compliance, having a well-organized, searchable archive of enterprise information can be a boon for knowledge workers. Imagine a new employee needing to research an old client account – instead of combing through personal PST files or network drives, they could query the enterprise archive to find all relevant communications and documents. Thus, enterprise content archiving can enhance institutional knowledge sharing. It ensures valuable information is not lost when employees leave or systems change. Some organizations even leverage their archives for analytics, mining years of communications for business insights (though this ventures into “big data” use of archives).
Outcomes:
The outcomes of enterprise content archiving are typically measured in terms of risk reduction, compliance assurance, and improved efficiency. Companies with robust archiving in place are far better prepared for audits, legal discovery requests, or compliance checks – they can respond quickly and confidently, which reduces the risk of fines or legal penalties. By centralizing and securing data, they mitigate the chance of important records being lost or improperly destroyed. In fact, compliance archiving is seen as a way to “mitigate legal risks” and facilitate legal holds smoothly, protecting the organization during litigation.
From an operational perspective, enterprise archiving brings order and consistency to information management. Instead of ad hoc, fragmented storage of old emails and files (or reliance on users to manually save things), there is a systematic approach. In other words, enterprise archiving gives C-level executives and data governance teams peace of mind that corporate information is under control.
There are also direct cost benefits: while the primary motivation might be compliance, enterprise archives often lower storage costs and streamline IT in the long run. By deduplicating and offloading data, they can save infrastructure costs similar to file archiving. Some organizations justify their archiving projects both in terms of risk avoidance and IT savings (tape/offsite storage costs, reduced load on servers, etc.). Additionally, user productivity can improve – employees and admins spend less time digging for old information or sifting through oversized mailboxes, and more time on high-value tasks. An archive with a good search interface means answers are only a quick query away, which enhances productivity and knowledge reuse.
In summary, enterprise content archiving treats information as a corporate asset that must be preserved, governed, and made accessible for the right purposes. It is a proactive strategy that aligns IT processes (data storage and retention) with business priorities (compliance, legal preparedness, and information utility). By doing so, it bridges the gap between the IT department’s need to manage storage and the business’s need to manage risk and knowledge. Next, we will compare file archiving and enterprise content archiving directly to highlight when each approach is appropriate and how they differ in impact.
Key Differences and Strategic Impact
When deciding between a file-centric archiving approach and an enterprise content archiving approach, it’s important to recognize their key differences in focus, capabilities, and business impact. Both approaches aim to deal with aging data, but they serve different needs. Here we compare them across several dimensions:
- Scope of Data: File archiving deals primarily with files in file systems – documents, spreadsheets, images, and other unstructured files typically stored on servers or network drives. Its purview is usually limited to these file shares or perhaps email attachments treated as files. In contrast, enterprise content archiving covers a much broader scope: not only files from file servers, but emails, messaging data, collaborative content, and documents / records from enterprise applications. For instance, a file archive might move old PDFs to cheaper storage, whereas an enterprise archive might capture the entire email correspondence, chat logs, and related documents about a project. This broader scope means enterprise archiving can give a 360-degree view of information (e.g. an email and the file attachment in it are archived together), which is essential for compliance and context.
- Primary Objective: The primary goal of file archiving is infrastructure optimization – freeing up space and reducing costs on primary storage. It is typically initiated by IT operations to solve problems like running out of disk space or backups taking too long. Any compliance benefit is secondary or incidental. On the other hand, the primary goal of enterprise content archiving is productivity for information workers, information governance and compliance, with storage savings as a useful byproduct. Enterprise archives are often sponsored by compliance officers, records managers, or CIOs looking to manage risk (also line of business leaders looking for productivity for document-centric processes). This difference in objectives influences how the solutions are evaluated: file archiving success might be measured in terabytes offloaded or dollars saved, whereas enterprise archiving success is measured in terms of legal compliance, audit readiness, and value of information managed.
- Metadata and Organization: File archiving usually retains basic metadata (file name, timestamps, perhaps the original folder path). It might not enrich the content with any additional metadata beyond what the file system had. In contrast, enterprise content archiving is metadata-driven. Content is classified on ingestion – for example, an email archive might tag emails by sender, recipient, subject, etc., and a document archive might categorize documents by type or business unit. This rich metadata enables powerful organization and retrieval of content, which file system archives can’t match. Additionally, enterprise archives often present a user-friendly interface or taxonomy for browsing archived content (e.g. browsing by project name or by communication type), whereas file archives may require IT to locate files based on directory or backup location. As a result, traditional file archives can suffer from “limited accessibility and search capabilities”, unlike enterprise archives which emphasize easy discovery.
- Search and Retrieval: Because of the metadata difference, search is a major differentiator. In a basic file archive, searching for content might involve knowing the exact file name or location, and IT might need to restore it to view the contents. Enterprise archives index the full content, allowing keyword searches across millions of documents and messages in seconds. Moreover, enterprise archives support eDiscovery features (such as legal hold, tagging, review workflows) out of the box, which simple file archives lack. In effect, if you need to routinely perform complex searches (e.g. “find all communications mentioning Project X between 2019–2021”), a content archiving solution is indispensable. File archiving alone would struggle with such a query, as it wasn’t designed for investigative search but rather for storage reclamation.
- Integration and Accessibility: File archiving operates mostly in the background at the storage layer. End-users typically access archived files either transparently via a stub (which is fine for individual files) or through IT assistance if, say, an entire archive needs to be loaded from tape. There is usually no direct end-user interface to browse the archive beyond the file system itself. In contrast, enterprise archiving solutions often provide user access tools: for example, an Outlook plugin to search the email archive, or a web portal where users can search all archived content they have permission to see. They also integrate with enterprise apps – for instance, archiving connectors for SAP or Salesforce will allow those systems to offload content to the archive and retrieve it on demand. This tight integration means business processes continue smoothly while the archive works behind the scenes. A file archive by itself cannot offload data from, say, a live SAP database in a governed way – that requires content-aware archiving. Therefore, enterprises looking to tie archiving into business workflows (such as archiving customer statements once generated, and still having them accessible via a CRM portal) will favor an enterprise content archive approach.
- Compliance and Governance Features: Perhaps the most critical difference is in compliance capabilities. A basic file archive might not provide specialized compliance features like audit trails, litigation hold, or granular retention schedules. Enterprise content archives are purpose-built to deliver those. They ensure every action is logged (who viewed or exported a document, when), they can enforce retention and deletion policies automatically, and they often have certifications or features for regulatory compliance (financial services, healthcare, etc.). For example, an enterprise archive can be configured to meet SEC 17a-4 or FINRA rules for data immutability, including making use of WORM storage. It can also ensure access controls and encryption on sensitive archived data, reducing security risks. Traditional file storage or backup-based archives usually lack these fine-grained controls – which is why many organizations recognize the “limitations of traditional archiving” in areas like security and scalability. Simply put, if an organization’s goal is compliance or legal defense, an enterprise content archive is the appropriate tool; using a file system archive or backup tapes for that purpose would be risky and inefficient.
- Complexity and Cost: File archiving solutions are often simpler to deploy – they might be a feature of a backup software (e.g. many backup vendors like Commvault or Veeam include a file archiving option) or a storage appliance feature. Enterprise archiving solutions can be more complex, as they involve capturing multiple data types and integrating with various systems. They may require more planning (to decide on retention policies, taxonomy, access roles, etc.) and involvement from cross-functional teams (legal, compliance, IT, business units). The initial cost of an enterprise archiving project is typically higher than enabling basic file archiving. However, the strategic benefits usually outweigh this if the use cases (compliance, discovery, etc.) are pressing. Investing in a comprehensive enterprise archiving solution yields the ability to manage data across its lifecycle with confidence and provides a more strategic and consistent approach to archive that is hugely beneficial to the business. In contrast, a file archiving approach might solve today’s storage crunch but could lead to siloed archives or gaps that create problems down the line (for example, data being archived without proper indexing, making it hard to find later).
Given these differences, when should an organization use which approach? In practice, it’s not always an either/or choice – many organizations start with file archiving to tackle immediate storage issues, and then evolve toward enterprise content archiving as their compliance and information governance needs grow. If an organization is small, with relatively straightforward data (mostly files) and is primarily concerned with lowering storage costs, a file archiving solution might suffice initially. It will deliver quick ROI by trimming storage usage and simplifying backups. However, as soon as an organization faces regulatory demands, legal inquiries, or the need to manage content from multiple repositories in a unified way, enterprise archiving becomes the more appropriate approach. For example, a mid-sized company that experiences a lawsuit involving emails will quickly realize that having an enterprise email/archive solution is invaluable for defensibility. Similarly, any enterprise in a regulated sector (finance, pharma, etc.) likely needs an enterprise archiving strategy from the outset to meet compliance obligations – relying on basic file or email archiving without the governance layer could lead to compliance gaps.
Strategically, enterprise content archiving aligns with a proactive information governance posture. It transforms archiving from a low-level IT task into a business enabling function. Organizations that implement enterprise archiving can leverage their archived data for insights and re-use (turning what was “dark data” into accessible knowledge). They also future-proof themselves against new data types can be plugged into the archive as the business adopts them, ensuring unified oversight. In contrast, file archiving on its own remains reactive and narrow in scope. It’s a tactical tool – very useful for housekeeping, but not sufficient as a long-term information governance solution.
In summary, file archiving vs. enterprise content archiving is analogous to tactical firefighting vs. strategic planning. The former deals with immediate data volume issues, while the latter builds an infrastructure for long-term compliance and information management. Both have their place: file archiving can be one component of a broader archiving strategy (and indeed, a good enterprise archiving platform will include file archiving capabilities). But relying solely on file system archiving would leave an organization exposed to the compliance and discovery front. As industry experts note, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to go beyond “traditional archiving” due to its limitations, and move towards comprehensive archiving solutions that are secure, scalable, and e-discovery friendly – essentially what we refer to here as enterprise content archiving.
SEAL Platform Overview
To illustrate how enterprise content archiving can be implemented in practice, let’s look at the SEAL platform and its capabilities. SEAL is a unified enterprise information archiving and content management platform designed to handle an organization’s unstructured content and records in a compliant, efficient manner. It provides a single, consolidated repository for all types of content (documents, emails, reports, images, etc.) along with their metadata, and offers tools to capture, index, store, and govern this content throughout its lifecycle. In essence, SEAL combines the functions of an archive, a records management system, and a content services platform in one solution.
Capabilities and Features: SEAL’s architecture is metadata-driven and built for scale and availability. Some of its key capabilities include:
- Content Capture and Ingestion: SEAL can capture content from a variety of sources. It includes document scanning and OCR for paper documents, allowing physical records to be digitized and ingested directly into the archive. It also supports “application-aware” content ingestion – for example, extracting and archiving content from SAP or SharePoint – and can ingest user-created files or automatically generated documents. This means whether the content originates in a legacy system, arrives via email, or is scanned from paper, SEAL can pull it into the unified archive. The platform even employs AI-powered document classification and metadata extraction to intelligently categorize incoming documents, which reduces manual effort in organizing content.
- Unified Content Repository and Search: All content in SEAL is stored in a centralized repository with a flexible, extensible data model. Instead of rigid folders, SEAL uses a metadata-based structure, enabling dynamic organization of content (sometimes called “perspectives”). Users can navigate and retrieve documents based on any metadata (for instance, view all documents related to a specific customer across different departments). The platform provides advanced search capabilities, indexing all content and metadata for quick retrieval. Users (with proper permissions) can search across the entire archive or filter by document type, date, author, etc. There is also an integrated document viewer that allows viewing of PDFs, images, Office documents, etc., directly within SEAL’s interface – no need to download files to open them. This unified repository breaks down information silos and ensures that, for example, an email attachment saved in one department and a scanned contract saved in another (or documents coming from different systems such as SAP, salesforce or SuccessFactors) can both be found and viewed in one place if they relate to the same topic.
- Records Management and Compliance: SEAL incorporates robust records management features to enforce retention and compliance policies. It supports defining a file plan, retention schedules for different record categories, and rules for controlled disposition (deletion or archival) of records. Administrators can set retention periods and disposition workflows – e.g., a manager’s approval might be required before certain records are destroyed. SEAL keeps an audit trail of all actions on documents (views, edits, exports), providing the oversight needed for compliance audits. It also offers features like legal holds (to suspend deletion of records under investigation) and integrated e-signature and long-term preservation For instance, documents can be digitally signed and sealed within the system, and SEAL can ensure the integrity of those documents over years or decades (important for things like contracts or notarial records). All of these tools mean that SEAL not only stores content, but also helps organizations “maintain the necessary compliance and governance toolsets” as they manage their archives.
- Process Automation and Integration: Uniquely, SEAL is not just a passive archive – it also includes a low-code process automation engine for workflows and metadata-driven automation rules. This allows organizations to build content-centric workflows (like an invoice approval process, or a customer onboarding document flow) that run on the platform. Documents in the archive can thus participate in active business processes. Tasks like routing a document for approval, notifying users of pending reviews, or composing a case file from multiple documents are supported. SEAL leverages metadata and rules to automate these tasks, enhancing productivity. Additionally, SEAL is designed as an open platform with multiple integration points. It provides a standard-based CMIS API, making it relatively easy to connect with external applications. Out-of-the-box connectors exist for popular enterprise systems – SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft SharePoint/Office/Outlook, Oracle, and more – allowing those systems to use SEAL as an external archive or content repository. For example, SEAL offers a Content Library connector for SAP that enables SAP to offload documents to SEAL while still letting SAP users retrieve those documents on demand. Similarly, a Salesforce integration might archive email attachments or case documents from Salesforce into SEAL, reducing storage in Salesforce and centralizing content. This deep integration means SEAL can sit at the core of an enterprise’s information ecosystem, serving as a central hub for content that various applications feed into or pull from.
- Scalability and Storage Backend: Under the hood, SEAL leverages scalable storage technology. In fact, it can integrate with object storage platforms like Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) as its underlying storage layer. This gives it virtually unlimited scalability and strong compliance storage capabilities (HCP provides features like WORM storage, geo-replication, etc.). SEAL’s architecture is built to support large volumes of data and many users, with a focus on availability. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud (as discussed in the next section), and supports multi-tenant configurations (useful if a service provider wants to host SEAL for multiple client organizations).
- User Experience: Despite its enterprise breadth, SEAL emphasizes a user-friendly experience designed for business users (not just IT admins). The interface allows users to easily search, retrieve, and even share documents (with security controls). For instance, SEAL supports creating document collections for sharing – a user can group certain documents and share that collection securely with others, even externally, with time-limited access if needed. Such features make it easier for business teams to collaborate using archived content, without resorting to shadow IT or bypassing the archive. The platform’s focus on simplicity and productivity aims to encourage adoption across business units, which is crucial for the success of any archiving solution.
In summary, SEAL provides a comprehensive set of capabilities that cover both the “productivity and cost reduction use cases (going digital, paperless, automation)” and the “compliance and risk reduction use cases (information governance, e-discovery, regulatory compliance)”. It allows organizations to “capture, transform, index and securely manage [their] entire electronic archive” cost-effectively. By doing so, SEAL serves the dual purpose of business enablement and compliance: on one hand, users can quickly find and leverage information (improving productivity and decision-making), and on the other hand, the company has confidence that its content is governed, retained, and protected according to policy (reducing risk).
Importantly, SEAL is designed to integrate with enterprise environments, including industry-specific applications. For example, in banking and insurance, there are often core systems (core banking platforms, policy administration systems) that produce documents (loan agreements, insurance claims, etc.). SEAL can integrate via APIs or connectors to ingest those outputs into the archive automatically, ensuring even those specialized records are centrally archived and managed. By offering connectors for ERP (SAP, Oracle), CRM (Salesforce), and others, SEAL addresses one of the key challenges in enterprise archiving – bringing together content from disparate systems.
Overall, the SEAL platform exemplifies what a modern enterprise content archiving solution looks like: unified, metadata-driven, compliance-oriented, and user-friendly. It shows that archiving is no longer an isolated IT task, but rather a foundational platform that underpins content management and governance across the enterprise. In the next section, we’ll discuss how SEAL is offered “as a Service,” highlighting the deployment options and benefits of consuming SEAL in the cloud as a fully managed solution.
SEAL as a Service Offering
While SEAL can be deployed on-premises, it is also available as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. SEAL as a Service delivers the full capabilities of the platform in a fully managed cloud environment, removing the burden of infrastructure management from the customer. Axivant (www.axivant.com) offers SEAL in the cloud via multi-tenant architecture – including options to run on Microsoft Azure – to provide flexibility and global reach. This means organizations can start using enterprise archiving quickly, without having to install or maintain the underlying servers, storage, and software themselves. All the heavy lifting is handled by the service provider, and the solution is delivered ready-to-use.
The benefits of SEAL’s SaaS model are significant:
- Reduced IT Complexity and Faster Deployment: In the SaaS model, the provider handles the deployment, configuration, and scaling of the platform. Enterprises do not need to procure hardware or manage installations/patches, the cloud offering bringing all the capabilities of SEAL to enterprises in an easy-to-consume, fully managed environment. New customers can be onboarded quickly, and they always have the latest version of the software (as updates are applied by the provider). This eliminates the cost, time, and complexity of deploying and updating the platform on-premises. In short, SEAL SaaS allows organizations to start archiving and governing content immediately, without the usual infrastructure setup delays.
- No Infrastructure Maintenance (Focus on Value): With SEAL as a Service, the responsibilities of maintaining servers, performing backups, ensuring high availability, and applying security updates all fall to the provider. The service is delivered from a robust cloud infrastructure (own data centers or from a top public cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure) and leverages cloud-native services like Azure Active Directory for secure authentication. For the customer, this means their IT teams can focus on using the archive to create business value rather than on managing the underlying IT. SEAL Online is a fully managed service allowing enterprises to focus on creating business value, outsourcing the upgrade, maintenance and performance tuning, which leads to faster time-to-value and lower costs compared to running it on-prem. Essentially, the headaches of provisioning and running the archiving infrastructure are removed – the provider takes care of uptime, scaling, and system health.
- Cost Efficiency – OpEx vs CapEx: The SaaS offering is provided on a subscription basis, which typically translates to an operational expense (OpEx) model (e.g. monthly or annual fee based on usage or capacity) instead of a large upfront capital expense. This “zero CAPEX, pay per use” model is highlighted as a way to reduce the total cost of ownership for archiving. Organizations don’t have to over-provision storage for future growth; the cloud service can scale as data grows, and the costs adjust accordingly. This elasticity ensures you pay only for what you use, and you can avoid the scenario of purchasing large archive storage systems that might sit underutilized. Moreover, the subscription often includes support and maintenance in the price, simplifying budgeting. For enterprises looking to optimize IT spending, consuming archiving as a service can be very attractive.
- Full Capability Parity and Governance in the Cloud: Despite being cloud-hosted, SEAL Online provides the same comprehensive features – content capture, search, records management, workflow, etc. – that the on-premises version does. Companies don’t sacrifice functionality by choosing the cloud deployment. They still get the benefit of enterprise-grade content governance “as a service.” For example, an organization can use SEAL SaaS to implement its retention policies and the service will enforce them just as an on-prem system would. The data is stored in the cloud with strong security (encryption, isolation between tenants, etc.), and many cloud deployments have built-in compliance certifications (like ISO, SOC2, etc.) which can help satisfy regulatory requirements. SEAL Online can be delivered from own Tier-3 data center or from Azure, giving customers geographic and compliance choices (which can be important for data sovereignty).
- Integration with Enterprise Applications: The SEAL cloud service remains an open, integrable platform. It supports the same connectors and APIs, meaning that even in the SaaS model, companies can connect their systems like SAP or Salesforce to SEAL. This means a customer using SEAL SaaS can, for example, archive SAP data to the cloud archive or have Salesforce records archived, just as they would on-prem. The difference is the archived content will reside in the cloud repository. This hybrid integration is powerful – it extends the benefits of archiving (reducing load on the source applications and centralizing governance) without requiring those source applications to be cloud-based themselves. In practice, a company could have an on-prem core banking system and still use SEAL SaaS to archive reports or statements from it via secure connection. The SaaS model does not isolate the archive from the rest of the enterprise; it’s designed to plug in seamlessly.
- Global Availability and Reliability: Consuming SEAL as a service can offer greater geographic reach and reliability than an individual company might achieve on its own. The service is available globally through a network of partners and cloud regions. This allows multinational organizations to use the archive service across offices and ensures users get good performance by accessing a nearby cloud region. The provider can also offer strong Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for uptime and performance. Some companies would build two or three copies of an archive system in different data centers for resiliency, but a cloud service can offer that level of resilience transparently. Thus, customers gain enterprise-grade durability and uptime for their archives.
In essence, SEAL as a Service delivers content, document-centric processes and information governance as a service, to be used immediately by any enterprise, without the cost, time and complexity of deploying, managing, and updating the platform by themselves. All infrastructure, security monitoring, and operational aspects are handled by the provider in the cloud. Companies can trust that they are always on the latest version of SEAL, with new features and patches applied regularly (which is important as compliance needs evolve and new content types emerge). This agility ensures the archiving solution keeps pace with the organization’s needs without constant IT intervention on the customer side.
To illustrate, consider a financial services company that chooses SEAL’s SaaS offering. They avoid a capital purchase of archive servers and instead subscribe to the service. The provider deploys their SEAL instance in a secure cloud environment (with encryption and isolated tenant data). The company then uses connectors to link their on-premises SAP or SharePoint, and cloud applications such as salesforce and SuccessFactors to the SEAL Online service. Within weeks, they have all their email, documents, and customer communication being archived to the cloud automatically. Their compliance officers can log into the SEAL web interface (or even via an Outlook plugin) to search and place holds on data. The IT team no longer worries about managing archive storage or backup – the data is in the cloud service, which is redundantly stored and backed by an SLA. As their data grows, their subscription tier grows, but they never run out of space or have to do a forklift upgrade. If any issue arises, they contact the service provider for support. Essentially, they have achieved their archiving and compliance objectives in a fraction of the time, and with predictable operational costs. This agility and efficiency is a major selling point for Archiving-as-a-Service offerings like SEAL’s.
In summary, SEAL as a Service provides a cloud-based, fully managed archiving solution that retains all the power of the SEAL platform while offering superior ease of use and scalability. It exemplifies the industry trend of moving archiving to the cloud – Gartner notes that “archiving as a service (aka cloud archiving) has rapidly surpassed on-premises archiving as the preferred deployment model” for many organizations. By leveraging SEAL in a SaaS model, organizations can accelerate their information governance projects, reduce IT overhead, and ensure that their archiving solution is always aligned with current needs and technologies. It combines the proven capabilities of an enterprise archiving platform with the convenience and efficiency of cloud delivery.
Conclusion
Data archiving is no longer optional in today’s data-driven and regulated business climate – it’s an essential practice for both operational efficiency and compliance. This whitepaper has examined two facets of archiving: file archiving, which addresses the IT challenge of managing storage growth by moving inactive data to cheaper storage; and enterprise content archiving, which addresses the broader organizational need to govern and leverage information long-term. While file archiving and enterprise content archiving share a common thread – preserving data that is not currently in active use – they differ significantly in scope and impact. File archiving is a focused solution yielding clear cost savings and storage optimization outcomes, making it a tactical tool for storage admins to keep systems lean. Enterprise content archiving, on the other hand, in addition to cost optimization, is a strategic enabler that integrates with business processes, ensures regulatory compliance, and unlocks the value in dormant data. It directly supports the responsibilities of Chief Data Officers, compliance managers, and business leaders by providing them with control and insight over the organization’s information assets.
Choosing the right approach (or combination of approaches) depends on an organization’s requirements. If an organization’s primary pain point is the volume of old files clogging up file servers and backups, and if regulatory pressures are minimal – then implementing file archiving policies (perhaps via a tool in their backup software or storage system) can yield quick wins. The IT team can demonstrate savings in storage costs and faster backups, which is often appreciated by leadership. However, as the enterprise grows and the data landscape becomes more complex, the limitations of a simplistic approach become apparent. Siloed archives or insufficient search capabilities can turn into liabilities, especially when facing compliance audits or legal discovery. It is at this stage that many organizations transition to a more unified enterprise content archiving strategy.
The key takeaway is that archiving should be viewed on a spectrum: at one end, basic file archiving tackles the “volume” problem; at the other, enterprise content archiving tackles the “value” problem (extracting value and managing risk in the data). Forward-thinking organizations often implement a layered strategy – for example, using policies to archive stale data at the storage level and deploying an enterprise content archiving platform to handle critical corporate content and records like application-generated documents and its associated metadata, documents, emails, legal records, etc..
For businesses evaluating their archiving needs, here are final recommendations:
- Assess Drivers and Risks: Identify if your archiving initiative is driven by cost, compliance, or both. If compliance is a driver (e.g., industry regulations, privacy laws, litigation exposure), prioritize solutions that offer strong enterprise content archiving capabilities like indexing, audit trails, and policy management. If cost is the only driver, start with file archiving but keep future compliance needs in mind. Often, it may make sense to invest in a solution that can scale up to compliance needs later rather than a dead-end fix.
- Engage Both IT and Business Stakeholders: As the target audience of this paper spans storage engineers to Chief Data Officers, it’s clear that archiving decisions benefit from cross-functional input. IT can speak to storage and technical integration issues, while legal/compliance officers can specify requirements for retention and e-discovery. Business unit leaders can highlight how easier access to historical information could improve their processes. An enterprise content archiving project, especially, should be a collaboration between IT and business to ensure it delivers value on all fronts.
- Consider the Cloud Option: As with many IT solutions, archiving is moving to the cloud. Evaluate whether a cloud archiving service (like SEAL SaaS or others) can meet your needs. Many organizations find that cloud archives offer quicker deployment and easier ongoing management, especially if they lack a large IT team to maintain complex systems. Ensure that any cloud service considered meets your data residency, sovereignity and security requirements. Gartner’s recent commentary suggests cloud archiving is now the preferred model for most use cases – a sign that it has matured and gained trust.
In conclusion, implementing the right archiving strategy is an investment in the organization’s future agility and resilience. File archiving can trim the fat from IT systems, while enterprise content archiving builds the muscle of corporate efficiency and compliance. Together, they ensure that data, whether stale or vital, is handled in the most appropriate way – stored cost-effectively, yet preserved with context and control for when it matters. The SEAL platform exemplifies how technology can deliver on this promise, offering a unified solution that caters to both IT efficiency and rigorous governance. By understanding the distinctions outlined in this paper, technical professionals and business leaders can make informed decisions to protect their data assets, comply with the law, and derive maximum value from information over the long term. In the era of unstructured content explosion and strict compliance, mastering archiving is not just about keeping data – it’s about keeping data safe and useful. With the right approach, archiving becomes a business enabler, turning dormant data into an accessible treasure trove and a shield against risk.
