Data Retention and Retrieval for Enterprises and
Government Organizations

Enterprises in every vertical industry along with government organizations across the globe are under increased pressure to store and leverage enormous amounts of business and consumer-oriented transaction data. Before being introduced to CopperEye, these organizations either stored this vast data in expensive relational database management systems (RDBMSs) or in hard to access data archives. Yet neither approach is truly appropriate for organizations that want timely access to large volumes of data— at an affordable price.

Not only are front and back-end business applications a prolific generator of data, but there is added pressure to keep data longer. Whether to comply with established regulatory guidelines and best practices or to be able to analyze historical patterns in their business to gain competitive advantage, organizations must maintain and leverage data longer than ever before. Equally, data must be accessible for interrogation so it can inform critical business processes and the stakeholders accountable for delivering compliance, customer satisfaction and growth.

Maintaining large data sets in application's production databases has led to numerous strategies that tend to reduce the affordability and accessibility of the data. In order to keep databases running at acceptable levels of performance, data managers must either

1) Deploy more hardware, software and staff to keep up with database maintenance requirements, or

2) Implement various schemes to off-load the data from production RDBMSs to avoid the ongoing additional expense.

Information Lifecycle Management or Tiered Storage

Whether you use the term "Information Lifecycle Management" (ILM) or "tiered storage," organizations are certainly familiar with the process: as time passes, older data is extracted from production databases into less and less expensive storage technologies. The cost of storing the data is certainly reduced, but it does so at the expense of making the data much less accessible. For example, if the data needed has been extracted to off-line archives, the archive must be located and the data reloaded into the database to make it accessible again. If time is of the essence in the retrieval of the data, this technique can introduce complexity, unacceptable time delays and operational disruption.

The best of both worlds?

What if you could store a large percentage of your valuable data in inexpensive flat-file storage and still access it using SQL? You would reap the economic benefits of data archives, coupled with the rapid and precise access available through a relational database.

This is the power of CopperEye Greenwich™ instead of adopting a strategy of continually moving your data into less expensive schemes that progressively reduce your ability to interact with your data over time, you can either store your data in Greenwich at the point of creation or extract your data once and manage it with Greenwich continuous SQL access, for long as you need it. The economics of keeping data has changed forever.

Making Data without Limits Work for You

What you can do with all this data is particular to your industry and limited only by your imagination. The following provides a few examples of what other organizations have envisioned:

Communications Service Providers

CSPs are the subject of various governmental regulations that require them to keep large volumes of data. The European Data Retention Directive (EUDRD) is one such regulation. CopperEye and Sun Microsystems have partnered to develop SDRS , an application that allows European CSPs to quickly and easily conform to the EU Data Retention Directive. Click here, to learn more about the EUDRD and SDRS.

Security Information Management

The face of security management has drastically changed in recent years. What used to be a series of ad hoc responses to individual threats has evolved into comprehensive security strategies. IT operations, information security and regulatory compliance groups are working together to create dedicated security information management architectures capable of collecting, storing and processing security data that is logged from networks, operating systems, storage systems, desktop security management tools, identity management tools and physical security systems. With such a large number of data sources, logging huge numbers of security events each hour, the data management challenge quickly escalates. What technology can keep up with the both the speed of data generation and the management of terabyte-scale?

Enterprises and Security Information Management vendors alike find CopperEye Greenwich™ and the CopperEye SDK to be the solution to their data management challenges.

Intelligence Community

In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community, has both invested in CopperEye and has purchased licenses of our products. Click to read more.