Oct 31, 2018
Earlier this year, space scientists discovered that the universe is expanding faster than they originally thought based on findings from the Hubble Space Telescope. This special telescope measures the distance to other galaxies by evaluating a type of star that dims and brightens in a foreseeable pattern. It’s important to know that galaxies are moving farther away from our own at an accelerating pace because in a few trillion years, this could lead to a dangerous cooling of the universe as well as stars running out of fuel. Thank goodness that’s a long way off and there’s plenty of time to prepare.
Something else expanding at an alarming rate is data; the content we all generate and consume online is accelerating more rapidly than ever before. By the time 2020 rolls around, people online will create around 1.7 megabytes of new data every second, each day. Add to that the 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes) of data that will already exist in the digital universe by then, and we’re talking about an expansion rate that could rival that of the universe – in theory, that is.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of data space available in the cloud. Cloud archiving company ZL Technologies, for example – which started out two decades ago as an email security company – archives all those gigabytes of data into cloud environments backed up and secured by Sungard Availability Services (“Sungard AS”).
ZL Technologies is a specialized provider of electronic content archiving software for the most demanding large enterprise environments. Built upon the industry’s most scalable platform, ZL offers organizations the ability to manage the entirety of their digital assets.
Today, ZL is involved in information management and the different components that it comprises. This includes such techniques as e-discovery and regulatory compliance, two of the biggest drivers for data archiving. By providing archiving solutions for emails, files, SharePoint, and other employee-created data types – not to mention archiving that data for regulatory compliance, e-discovery and records management – ZL has its hands full.
Lately the trend has been towards cloud archiving, which brings its own challenges in terms of larger data centers and more reliable back-up systems. The key to these growing requirements is resilience – being able to anticipate risk, mitigate the impact and move forward with confidence, ensuring critical applications and data are always available.
A perfect example is a client with one of the nation’s largest repositories of documents and records, which uses ZL Unified Archive® for a cloud-based records management solution. Responsible for preserving documents up to hundreds of years old, this organization is known as a pioneer in records management, creating a records management standard for all its subsidiaries and many other large organizations. They approached ZL Technologies for a cloud-based solution to manage their records with three primary objectives:
- archive emails to a secure cloud environment, while improving end-user access
- establish best practices in email management standards for other organizations to emulate
- index emails for eDiscovery and other document requests
ZL Unified Archive® (ZL UA) was deployed to help the agency execute these initiatives through its centralized archiving, records management and eDiscovery functionality. The unified platform offered the client options for on-premise, cloud and hybrid information management, eliminating data silos and data duplicates and assuring consistent search and retention across all organizational data.
In the end, ZL Technologies provided its customer with a comprehensive hosted solution for its eDiscovery, archiving, and records management requirements, making emails available for search and retrieval to both legal teams and end-users (with appropriate access controls). Addressing the lifecycle management of both records and non-records alike, ZL UA delivered unparalleled information governance through its cloud offering.
Backing up all this data is the Sungard AS Enterprise Cloud Service, a fully managed Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution featuring managed multi-site availability, managed applications on the cloud, and an availability service-level agreement (SLA). Sungard AS’ Enterprise Cloud Service offers multiple layers of protection and failover options to keep business up and running, plus the flexibility to scale to a customer’s environment allowing them to expand as they grow.
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