Data archiving: A goldmine of institutional knowledge that AI can uncover
Blog: OpenText Blogs

The growing complexity and cost of maintaining terabytes of dormant data, legacy applications and systems, and of complying with ongoing security threats and regulatory requirements can be an overwhelming burden on IT departments. It’s a distraction from more strategic activities you could pursue if you had more time and capital. Data acquired during mergers and acquisitions that must be retained but will never be moved into production systems also incur similar costs.
But what if, in addition to eliminating this ongoing drain on IT resources and keeping your security and compliance up to date, you could also turn this aging data into a strategic asset?
Turning to a modern data archiving solution can transform the dead weight of aging and unused data into a strategic resource. To drive institutional agility and transformation, organizations need comprehensive, integrated archiving capabilities—tools that not only reduce retention costs and improve compliance but also unlock greater value from data through the new capabilities brought by AI.
Let’s explore how data archiving solutions enable organizations to apply AI to their legacy data within a platform that provides secure, trustworthy access to AI assistants and intelligent analysis capabilities. These tools drive decision-making and provide users with a powerful assistant that can understand, contextualize, and analyze archived data and content.
A data archiving foundation for intelligence
Most organizations already recognize the need to archive data, whether for compliance, legal readiness, or operational optimization. But data archiving software provides advantages beyond storing historical information, providing a foundation for innovation and intelligence, allowing companies to:
- Retain and secure data across systems and applications
- Maintain compliance with evolving data privacy laws
- Reduce storage and infrastructure costs
- Efficiently archive both SAP and non-SAP data
- Preserve institutional knowledge even as experts leave
- Enable employees to access information quickly and reliably
And perhaps most importantly, a data archiving platform ensures the data remains useful. Even if information is decades old and the original subject matter experts are gone, users can still understand and act on the content by embedding GenAI directly into the data archiving platform.
A unified and intelligent data archiving approach
With a comprehensive, enterprise-grade approach to data archiving designed for both structured and unstructured information, organizations can store, protect, and manage virtually any dataset across applications, business units, and clouds.
But the real power emerges when AI is directly embedded in the archiving platform, transforming data archives from a vault into a readily-accessible and agile resource. With an AI content assistant, users can interact with archived content in natural language and instantly summarize, analyze, and generate insights. This capability works across both structured datasets and unstructured documents, giving employees a simple, intuitive way to extract meaning and context from information.
With an AI content assistant that searches archived reports and contextualized views of data—not raw, disorganized datasets or rigidly formatted reports—results are highly accurate and relevant. It’s essentially like having a data scientist embedded inside the data archive, making the following possible:
- Business insights from historic data: Organizations often store decades’ worth of transactional records, such as customer billing statements, invoices, and purchase histories. With an AI content assistant embedded within the data archiving platform, a user can ask:
- “Summarize buying patterns for a specific customer.”
- “Give me a deduplicated list of items shipped to this location.”
- “Graph the daily trade volume for this customer over the quarter.”
What once required manual searching and sorting is now automated and instantaneous.
- Search and navigation made easy: Traditional full-text, Boolean, and form-based searching and reporting remain available, while AI-powered search to helps users locate otherwise buried facts even across massive, multi-system datasets. Additionally, by retrieving and using metadata from business applications, AI tools enhance contextual understanding and support queries that rely on metadata fields.
- Rapid discovery for legal and compliance teams: In legal hold or eDiscovery situations, teams can quickly identify relevant documents and export them for attorney review. AI accelerates this process by pinpointing the highest-value information instead of requiring teams to comb through endless files.
- Summarization and contextual understanding: When teams are handed legacy systems or inherit unfamiliar datasets after an acquisition, AI can summarize large, complex archives so users get up to speed without needing historical expertise.
A recognized information archiving leader
A modern data archiving platform should do more than store information, it should make it usable, discoverable, and insightful. And OpenText™ Content Aviator, the AI content assistant, does exactly that, bringing new levels of visibility to data and content within a data archive.
Named a “Top Player” in information archiving by the Radicati Group, OpenText is recognized in part for our leadership in bringing GenAI capabilities to cloud-based data archiving. This industry recognition shows the commitment to delivering secure, scalable, and intelligent data archiving solutions, including OpenText™ Information Archive and OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP Solutions.
As data volumes climb and regulatory pressure intensifies, organizations that embrace AI-enabled data archiving will be better equipped to adapt, innovate, and lead.
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