Organisations must continually assess the cost of maintaining live data and applications for compliance and reference. The continued support and hardware costs must be weighed against the value of keeping the data live and accessible in its original form. Long retention periods can result in unnecessarily maintaining data in multiple systems, complicated by the fact of having to pay for software licences and hardware costs.

While archiving is the obvious solution, new processes may raise concerns over disruption to operations and productivity, or worse, inflexible security controls may raise flags for IT. As a result, data often remains online in expensive, obsolete applications or is taken offline from the user base where the only value is retention compliance or legal hold. There is another option.