Regulatory Compliance through Sustainable, Long-Term Access to Historical Records

Applications are temporary, data is permanent. This fact of life has huge bottom-line consequences for your enterprise. To manage costs and improve control over your application infrastructure, you need to reduce the total number of applications you support. Yet regulatory compliance requires you to retain transactional data for up to thirty years or more. Until now, retiring legacy applications has meant maintaining millions of records on expensive production servers or difficult-to-access storage classes. As a result, many IT departments actually forestall legacy application retirement and continue to maintain multiple copies of transactional data in the production environment long after active usage.

OuterBay Encapsulated Archive changes all that. OuterBay takes an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach to application data, allowing you to dedicate high-end resources to production data while assigning inactive data to low-cost storage classes. The OuterBay Application Data Management (ADM) suite is designed to help you improve system performance, reduce the TCO of your IT infrastructure and achieve regulatory compliance by managing the entire application data lifecycle, from cradle to grave.

The latest addition to the OuterBay ADM suite, Encapsulated Archive addresses the final stage of the information lifecycle. With Encapsulated Archive, you can identify inactive data¸from either your production database or OuterBay LiveArchive¸and relocate it to an open-standards based XML archive for sustainable, long-term access on low-cost storage platforms.

Regulatory Compliance Requires Better Data Retention Policies

With Encapsulated Archive, OuterBay addresses a major issue for corporate governance, as mounting pressure to comply with regulatory requirements forces companies to re-evaluate their data retention policies. Today, more than 10,000 federal and state regulations mandate how companies must protect, store, and access current and historical transaction records. To comply with regulations like FASB, HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley, companies must actively manage application data as never before.

Compliance means you have to set and enforce data retention policies, then archive inactive data in an accessible format. Records must be tamper-proof and able to survive potential system changes, even the retirement of the application itself. Comprehensive audit trails must be maintained.

The Industry's First Self-Describing XML Archive Software

Encapsulated Archive is the only open standards-based XML archive to store aged data as complete business transactions that remain independently addressable across generations of applications, platforms and storage mediums. The data is "encapsulated" with all necessary reference metadata, so that business transactions within the archive can be accessed by any XML query, even after the source application has been retired.

OuterBay Encapsulated Archive enables IT departments to move application data to the most cost-effective platform corresponding to each phase in the information lifecycle: from production database on high-performance servers, to live archive on lower-cost storage classes, to encapsulated archive on the lowest cost storage classes.

OuterBay users can move historical records from LiveArchive, where the data can be accessed through the original application interface, to Encapsulated Archive, where it is stored in XML format along with XML Schema Definitions (XDS) that provide complete information on every transaction. Alternatively, users can move data directly from production environments to Encapsulated Archive.

• Identify inactive legacy data based on activity history and retention policies
• Relocate inactive business transactions to disk- or file-based storage in a self-contained, self-describing, and survivable XML-based format
• Retain online access to the data via standard XML query tools.

Encapsulated Archive creates a complete, self-describing, static record of transactions and stores the data in XML format. As a result, the archived transaction record is completely independent of application, platform, database, or operating system.

By completing the information lifecycle for application and database content, OuterBay Encapsulated Archive delivers the following benefits:

• Survivability: Archives historical data in survivable format that remains usable even beyond the lifetime of the production system.
• Sustainability: Remains independent of source application, file system, operating system, and platform.
• Real-time, Standards Based Access: Provides archive access via xQuery, the open, XML standard query language supported by thousands of third-party vendors. Relational technologies can also access this data container.
• Storage Independent: Enables the use of low-cost storage classes, including CAS, ATA.
• Compliance Reporting: Supports audits for compliance, reference, and litigation.
• Integration: Uses policy-based archive process and data retention policies as defined in OuterBay Application Resource Monitor
• Audit Trail: Copies transaction and reference data from OLTP and logs transaction state
• Direct Integration with EMC Centera: Direct archive to Centera as well as load/reload between Centera and the file system.
• Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Custom Application Support