Informatica Pushes Database Archiving into the Cloud

Informatica is taking database archiving to the cloud with an offering aimed at enterprises.

Informatica Data Archive Cloud Store Option "supports almost all structured data including relational databases, enterprise applications and data warehouses," the company said. The idea is to offer enterprises another way to manage growing amounts of data cost-effectively.

"Companies are rethinking their approach to data retention as their data volumes continue to grow exponentially and they have to hold onto that data for long periods of time," Adam Wilson, general manager for ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) at Informatica, said in a statement. "Informatica's Data Archive Cloud Store Option provides the ideal approach to cost-effectively maintain these large, infrequently accessed data volumes."

According to Informatica, the service will initially be available at the end of the first quarter of 2010 on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). "Future versions will support deployment on other IAAS [infrastructure as a service] providers," the company said.

The service uses "encryption and application-specific business rules" to maintain data security and quality, and "automatically distributes processing [loads] to accommodate spikes in utilization when reporting requirements grow," Informatica said. "Archived data remains fully accessible to users via standard SQL querying, reporting and discovery tools."

"Organizations today are looking to find ways to more cost-effectively and securely archive their data, while maintaining easy access," Simon Robinson, research director for Storage at The 451 Group, said in a statement.

Businesses are increasingly considering the cloud for databases and storage. Forrester Research estimated in 2009 that 18 percent of enterprises were considering the use of cloud databases.

"Storing archived data in the cloud is well suited to the elasticity of cloud services, given the dynamic nature of the data access and the promise of cost-efficiencies gained through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) deployments," Robinson added.