Exploring Cold Data Storage Solutions in Higher Education

The evolution of data storage has seen a shift from traditional physical media to more advanced and flexible solutions, such as cloud storage. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations manage and access their data, offering scalable, cost-effective, and convenient storage options.

In the start of the 21st century, early cloud storage providers began offering scalable solutions for data storage that didn’t require companies to keep and maintain server rooms on site. Today, many businesses and organizations of all sizes create and store large amounts of data for a variety of reasons.

”In the context of data storage, cold storage refers to storing data that doesn’t need to be accessed frequently but needs to be preserved for compliance, regulatory reasons, backup, or archival.”

Advantages to Storing Media in Cold Storage

In the context of data storage, cold storage refers to storing data that doesn’t need to be accessed frequently but needs to be preserved for compliance, regulatory reasons, backup, or archival. A network of connected devices is used to save files, documents and other media to a remote database, rather than storing them on a computer’s hard drive, a local storage device or an on-site server maintained by the organization. Information is accessible when needed, but not taking up active storage space.

Storing media in cold storage offers several advantages, particularly for institutions that need to retain large amounts of data for long periods of time.

• Cost-Effectiveness: Cold storage solutions are significantly more cost-effective than traditional storage options, including for third-party providers like Zoom, Class Collaborate, Webex, and Teams.
• Long-Term Retention: Cold storage is designed for long-term data retention, which can be archived and stored for regulatory compliance, historical records, or in other instances where immediate access is not required.
• Data Preservation: Cold storage systems are optimized for data durability and reliability. They use redundant storage mechanisms and data integrity checks to ensure that data remains intact over time, reducing the risk of data loss due to hardware failures or other issues.
• Scalability: Institutions can easily scale their cold storage solutions as their data storage needs grow. This allows them to adapt to changing requirements without significant infrastructure changes.
• Data Security: Cold storage systems can offer enhanced security features, such as encryption at rest, to ensure that archived data remains protected from unauthorized access.
• Regulatory Compliance: Many institutions are required to retain data due to regulatory or legal obligations. Cold storage provides a reliable way to meet these requirements.
• Backup and Disaster Recovery: Cold storage can serve as a secondary backup option for critical data, providing an additional layer of protection against data loss due to disasters or hardware failures.

Manage Large Data Workloads With Ease

YuJa Himalayas Enterprise Archiving Platform helps institutions manage large workloads, identify compliance issues and create data retention policies, which are built in the cloud and meets SOC-2 Compliance standards.

Effective Technology for Managing Your Institutional Retention Policy

Storing Your Institution’s Digital Content

In an age where much of your institution’s content is created and stored digitally, finding a storage repository that meets your needs affordably has become a challenge. At YuJa, we recognized the issue institutions were facing. Not only were university and college officials being forced to either find individual videos, download and then delete them from the platform they used to create it — a manual and laborious process — or to pay additional fees for using video conferencing products as a repository.

YuJa offers a Data Management tool within the Video Platform that enables administrators to create data policies to archive content based on views, type, user and date of upload. Another tool, YuJa Himalayas for Digital Compliance, allows you to identify compliance issues, manage risks and enables e-discovery scenarios. 

Data Retention and Management Policies Support Video Life Cycle Management

Administrators can create and enforce data management policies within the Data Management tab of the Admin Panel. Administrators can define one or more policies that enable bulk data review capabilities, as well as data governance of an institution’s video repository.

Using the Video Platform’s Data Management, content managers can: 

• Define customized data policies to automatically govern how content is archived, retrieved, purged or segmented
• Review and search video conference recordings
• Analyze and search visual content
• Archive content in the cloud affordably

Data Management Policies Help Automate and Streamline Workflows 

The Data Management panel enables the creation, editing, deletion and execution of data administration policies to identify specific data subsets.  This content can be deleted, downloaded (individually or in bulk) or archived. Each policy can specify multiple rules including:

• Content added before a specific date
• Content added before a certain number of days
• Content added by specific users
• The exclusion of specific user content
• Type of content created
• Media not viewed for a specific amount of days

Successful Management Saves Terabytes of Data

Several institutions have implemented various rule types to save both time and money in data storage and management costs. 

• The University of North Dakota was able to reduce its overall storage by 24 terabytes (TBs) by creating a rule to find and remove all student videos created prior to a certain date. The policy was created using a combination of custom rules YuJa supports, including video content owned by student rule types along with content without any views within a 180-day period.
• HEC Montreal found 17 TBs of content that did not have a single end-user view within a 60-day period. They created a policy based on YuJa’s custom role policy to track and filter unviewed content. 
• MSU Denver archived more than 14 TBs of content based on a 548/548 rule. The institutional policy allowed them to find videos that were both uploaded 548 days ago and that had no views within a 548-day period and archived those videos 

For more information on how to set up data management policies, view our support article with step-by-step instructions.