Archive-as-a-Service – Features and challenges
For IT service providers who provide offerings on an as-a-Service (aaS) basis, the customer is the focus. In order to make sure this remains the case, they need IT solutions that offer services today that will still be winning customers tomorrow. The goals here are to reduce costs, increase efficiency, improve the benefits and reduce the level of complexity involved. And, of course, service providers need to guarantee maximum security. Archive-as-a-Service (AaaS) represents an example of this. Under this model, businesses supply the infrastructure and services needed to manage and archive their customers’ data. From the customer’s perspective, the workflow should remain exactly the same as ever.
Archive-as-a-Service, like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is an option derived from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Within the IT infrastructure, the foundation upon which everything else is built, storage systems have become an extremely high priority for businesses in the last few years.
Constantly rising data volumes will further increase the demands placed upon such systems. Finding the perfect balance between stability, efficiency, flexibility, scalability and complexity is therefore becoming more and more important. In addition to this, businesses have to factor in critical requirements set by legislators, customers, suppliers or large industry associations – and this is particularly true when it comes to secure archiving. IT service providers therefore need a reliable AaaS solution. As experts in their field, they cannot permit either capacity problems or outages. Since customer support is the primary task for service providers, IT should not cause them significant time or money. There is a solution that makes all of this possible:
Archive-as-a-Service – Making archiving less complex
The solution, in fact, is automatic archiving based on Information Lifecycle Management principles, which reduces management work. The best approach is to use a multi-tier storage infrastructure that integrates seamlessly into a business’ infrastructure and enables fast, reliable access. By combining flash, hard drive, private and public cloud, tape and optical storage with a hierarchical storage management software solution, service providers can have the cost-effective, scalable, strictly managed storage platform they need to meet all of their archiving requirements.
The storage software automatically manages how data is moved around, so it should be easy to use and require no changes from the way users and applications used to work. Additional important considerations are rapid amortization and investment protection. The latter of these can be achieved by combining various different storage media together. This approach efficiently implements Archive-as-a-Service solutions and makes archiving easy.
“As IT service providers, you supply services and data to your customers – and you have to work with large volumes of data yourselves. We offer the software that allows you to concentrate on your core role,” says Thomas Thalmann, CEO at PoINT Software & Systems GmbH.
Archive-as-a-Service – Increase efficiency and benefits, reduce costs
The PoINT Storage Manager archiving software makes Information Lifecycle Management a reality and works within a hierarchical storage architecture with all modern storage systems and technologies. For IT service providers, it represents the ideal solution, as it allows them to focus on their core role. The PoINT Storage Manager is quick and easy to implement and can meet the individual compliance requirements of any industry. It automatically transfers and archives data while ensuring that users follow the same workflow as ever and that data is stored efficiently. The software also makes archiving less complicated, increases efficiency and utility, and reduces costs.
Did you know...
...that the new PoINT Archival Gateway is capable of handling 10,000 simultaneous users? Thanks to its clear, comprehensible GUI, service providers have a constant overview of the status of the system including its repositories, capacity usage, object counts and performance. The Gateway can read and write over 1 PB of data per day.
