Data Lifecycle Management & Archival Services
Transform your data from a costly liability into a strategic asset. We design and implement intelligent, AI-enabled frameworks to automate data retention, slash storage costs, and ensure you are always audit-ready and compliant.
Trusted by Global Leaders to Manage Their Most Critical Data Assets:
Why CIS for Data Lifecycle Management?
Go beyond basic storage. We deliver a comprehensive governance framework that reduces risk, optimizes cost, and unlocks the hidden value in your data.
AI-Powered Policy Engine
We leverage AI and machine learning to analyze your data, recommend intelligent retention and archival policies, and automate classification, ensuring your framework is both smart and efficient from day one.
Ironclad Compliance & Governance
Navigate complex regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX with confidence. We build auditable, automated workflows for legal holds, eDiscovery, and defensible deletion, minimizing your compliance risk.
Drastic Cost Reduction
Stop paying premium prices for inactive data. Our intelligent tiered storage strategies can reduce your overall storage and backup costs by up to 70% by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective tier.
Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Mastery
Whether your data lives on-premise, in AWS, Azure, GCP, or a mix of everything, we design unified lifecycle policies that provide a single, consistent governance layer across your entire IT estate.
Unlock Archived Data Value
Your archive isn't a data graveyard. We implement solutions that make your historical data easily searchable and accessible for analytics, reporting, and AI/ML model training, turning a cost center into a value driver.
Seamless System Integration
Our solutions integrate directly with your existing enterprise systems—from SAP and Salesforce to M365 and custom applications—to manage data at its source without disrupting your core business operations.
End-to-End Data Security
Security is embedded in every stage. We ensure your data is encrypted, access is controlled, and its integrity is maintained throughout its lifecycle, whether it's active, in-transit, or archived.
Defensible Deletion Strategy
Confidently dispose of data that has outlived its business and legal purpose. We establish automated, policy-based deletion processes that are fully documented and defensible during audits or litigation.
20+ Years of Enterprise Expertise
Since 2003, we've been the trusted partner for complex data challenges. Our CMMI Level 5 and ISO 27001 certified processes ensure your project is delivered with the highest standards of quality and security.
Our Comprehensive DLM & Archival Services
We offer a full spectrum of services to design, implement, and manage a robust data lifecycle strategy tailored to your unique business, compliance, and cost-optimization needs.
Data Lifecycle Strategy & Health Assessment
Before you can manage your data, you need to understand it. Our assessment provides a 360-degree view of your current data landscape, identifying risks, cost inefficiencies, and compliance gaps. We analyze your data types, sources, growth rates, and access patterns to build a data-driven business case and a strategic roadmap for your DLM initiative.
Key Outcomes & Benefits
- Clear Visibility: Get a comprehensive inventory and map of your enterprise data, from production systems to shadow IT.
- Actionable Roadmap: Receive a prioritized plan with clear steps, timelines, and expected ROI for implementing a DLM framework.
- Risk Identification: Uncover hidden compliance and security vulnerabilities in your current data handling practices before they become a problem.
Retention & Governance Policy Development
A strong DLM framework is built on clear, enforceable policies. We work with your legal, compliance, and business teams to define and document comprehensive policies for data retention, archival, and defensible deletion. We map these policies to specific regulations (like CCPA, GDPR, etc.) and data types, creating a clear rulebook for your organization's data.
Key Outcomes & Benefits
- Audit-Ready Framework: Establish a clear, documented governance structure that satisfies auditors and regulators.
- Consistent Enforcement: Eliminate guesswork and inconsistent data handling across departments with centralized, easy-to-understand policies.
- Legal Defensibility: Create a robust framework for defensible deletion, reducing litigation risk and eDiscovery costs.
Archival & Tiered Storage Implementation
This is where strategy becomes reality. Our experts deploy and configure the right tools to automate your data lifecycle policies. This includes setting up intelligent data tiering across cloud and on-premise storage, implementing archival platforms for long-term retention, and integrating these systems with your core applications for seamless, automated data movement and management.
Key Outcomes & Benefits
- Automated Efficiency: "Set it and forget it" policies that automatically move data to the right storage tier at the right time.
- Optimized Performance: Keep your production systems lean and fast by offloading inactive data without losing accessibility.
- Future-Proof Architecture: Implement a flexible, scalable solution that can adapt to new data sources and storage technologies.
Managed DLM & Compliance Monitoring
Data governance is not a one-time project; it's an ongoing discipline. Our managed services ensure your DLM framework continues to operate optimally and evolve with your business. We provide continuous monitoring, regular policy reviews, compliance reporting, and expert support to manage your data ecosystem, so you can focus on your core business.
Key Outcomes & Benefits
- Proactive Governance: Stay ahead of new regulations and evolving data needs with continuous expert oversight.
- Reduced Overhead: Offload the day-to-day management of your data lifecycle infrastructure to our certified experts.
- Continuous Improvement: Receive regular reports and recommendations for further cost optimization and risk reduction.
Proven Success in Enterprise Data Management
See how we've helped organizations in highly regulated industries gain control of their data, slash costs, and strengthen their compliance posture.
Global Financial Services Firm Masters Audit-Readiness
Industry: Banking & Financial Services
Client Overview: A multinational investment bank with operations in North America and EMEA was facing immense pressure from regulators (FINRA, SEC) regarding data retention and auditability. Their legacy, on-premise infrastructure was a patchwork of disparate systems, making eDiscovery a costly, manual, and month-long process. Storage costs were spiraling out of control due to redundant data and a lack of a clear deletion policy.
Key Challenges:
- Inability to respond to regulatory audits in a timely manner.
- Exorbitant costs and time spent on legal discovery requests.
- Uncontrolled growth of expensive, high-performance storage.
- High risk of non-compliance fines due to inconsistent data retention.
Our Solution:
CIS designed and implemented a unified, hybrid-cloud data lifecycle management framework. Our approach included:
- Deploying an AI-powered data discovery and classification tool to inventory all financial transaction data, communications, and customer records.
- Developing granular, automated retention policies mapped directly to FINRA and SEC requirements.
- Implementing a cloud-based, WORM-compliant archive (AWS S3 Glacier Vault Lock) for immutable, long-term storage.
- Integrating a centralized eDiscovery platform that provided a single search interface across both active and archived data.
Our Technology & Platform Expertise
We are platform-agnostic and leverage a best-of-breed technology stack to build the ideal DLM solution for your specific environment.
What Our Clients Say
Our 95% client retention rate is built on trust, expertise, and delivering measurable results.
"The data archival solution CIS implemented has been a game-changer. We've significantly reduced our cloud storage bill while improving our ability to access historical data for analytics. Their team understood our complex healthcare compliance needs perfectly."
"We needed a defensible deletion policy that our legal team could stand behind. CIS not only helped us write the policy but also implemented the automation to enforce it. The peace of mind is invaluable."
"Our data was spread across three different cloud providers. CIS created a unified governance strategy that gave us a single pane of glass for managing retention and access. Their multi-cloud expertise is top-notch."
Frequently Asked Questions
Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) is a policy-based approach to managing the flow of an information system's data throughout its life cycle: from creation and initial storage to the time it becomes obsolete and is deleted. It involves processes for handling data as it moves through different stages, including active use, archival, and destruction, while ensuring its integrity, security, and compliance with regulations.
Backups are copies of data primarily for disaster recovery. DLM is a much broader strategic process. It's about managing the *original* data's entire journey based on its value and compliance requirements. DLM determines how long data should be kept, where it should be stored (e.g., expensive fast storage vs. cheap archival storage), and when it should be securely deleted, which are functions beyond the scope of a simple backup strategy.
Security is paramount in our approach. We are ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified. Our solutions incorporate end-to-end encryption (for data at rest and in transit), strict access controls based on the principle of least privilege, immutable storage options (WORM), and comprehensive audit trails to track every action taken on your data. We build security into the fabric of your data lifecycle.
The timeline varies based on the complexity and scale of your data environment. A typical project follows a phased approach: an initial assessment and strategy phase can take 2-4 weeks. The implementation of core archival and policy automation can range from 2 to 6 months. We prioritize a phased rollout to deliver value quickly and minimize disruption to your business operations.
Absolutely. Legacy data migration and archival is one of our core competencies. We have proven methodologies and tools to extract, transform, and load data from outdated systems (like old ERPs, mainframes, or custom applications) into a modern, accessible, and cost-effective archive, all while maintaining data integrity and chain of custody.
Ready to Take Control of Your Data?
Let's talk. Schedule a complimentary, no-obligation consultation with one of our Data Governance experts. We'll discuss your challenges and outline a clear path to reducing costs, mitigating risk, and unlocking the full value of your enterprise data.
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