Electronic archiving generally refers to the storage of information in electronic form. A special case of electronic archiving is the audit-proof archiving of documents relevant to commercial and tax law, for which special requirements apply, in particular immutability and long-term availability in accordance with the applicable retention periods.
As a rule, special archiving systems are used for electronic archiving. The term electronic archiving encompasses different components of an enterprise content management system, which are referred to separately as “records management”, “storage” and “preservation”. The scientific term “archive” in the sense of long-term archiving is not identical in content to the term used by the document management industry.
The term electronic archiving is used in many different ways. While companies today consider retention periods of ten years for data and documents relevant to commercial law and tax law to be very difficult to implement, historical archives speak of a secure, orderly and always accessible storage of information with storage periods of several centuries. In view of the constantly changing technologies, new software, formats and standards, this is a major challenge for the information society.
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The storage, indexing and provision of information is a prerequisite for the functioning of modern companies and administrations. With the exponential growth of electronic information, the problems of long-term retention are growing, even though modern software techniques are much better at managing information than was traditionally possible with paper, file folders and shelves. More and more information is being created digitally, and the output as paper is only a possible representation of the original electronic document. The use of electronic signatures gives electronic documents the same legal character as manually signed documents. Such digital documents only exist in electronic form. These developments are now forcing every company to take a closer look at the topic of electronic archiving.
In order to meet these requirements, archiving systems consisting of databases, archive software and storage systems have been created, which are offered by numerous manufacturers and system integrators. These systems are usually based on the approach of using a reference database with the management and index criteria to point to an external repository in which the information objects are kept. This so-called reference database architecture was necessary to move large amounts of information from the fast but cost-intensive online storage to separate archive stores. The database allows the document to be retrieved at any time via the index and made available to the user with an appropriate display program. In the early days of this technology, it was mostly a matter of very closed, self-contained systems that practically led to “islands” in the IT landscape. Today, archive systems are integrated into the IT infrastructure as subordinate services (service-oriented architecture), are served directly by office communication and specialist applications, and also provide these applications with the necessary information for processing and display. For the user, it is irrelevant where the required information is stored. The discussion about the “right” storage medium for electronic archiving is usually only conducted by IT specialists, project staff and legal departments when it comes to the selection and implementation of an electronic archiving system.
