Digital archiving approach offers secure, scalable storage

In the age of Big Data, it’s not uncommon to hear that this or that company is analyzing huge volumes of data. But Bucap S.p.A is different: it’s not analyzing huge quantities of data; it’s archiving huge quantities of data. And it’s not archiving its own data; it’s archiving data on behalf of public, private, and governmental organizations throughout Italy. Some of that data may not be touched for decades, but some of that data may be required at a moment’s notice. Bucap’s customers need to know their data is secure and that they can access it without delay if and when necessary.

How does Bucap ensure long-term data security and integrity alongside near-term accessibility and accessibility? With the Actian Ingres hybrid database.

Solution

Back in 1995, after several years of expanding its presence in the archiving and storage marketplace, Bucap management realized that meeting the company’s growth goals would depend on smart investments in IT. Not only could Bucap offer services supporting the archival of physical records, but by investing in IT it could also seize a competitive advantage by offering efficient, high-quality services for archiving digital data.

Bucap knew it needed to build an archiving solution that would be scalable, reliable, highly available, and easy to maintain in order to support all the business processes of storage, indexing, retrieving, and displaying documents at the service levels it wanted to offer its customers. Two goals stood out: make it easy for customers to manage their own data, documents, and images autonomously; and reduce the time and cost involved with doing so.

“We evaluated the available enterprise-grade relational database solutions that were available at the time to identify the one that best met our requirements,” says Ruggero Rinaldi, general manager at Bucap. “After careful analysis of features and performance characteristics, we chose the Actian Ingres Hybrid database.”

Actian Ingres: A Winning Choice

The Actian Ingres Hybrid Database combines the industry-leading Actian Ingres transactional and Vector analytic databases, bundled with world class integration and enterprise monitoring. Bucap chose Actian Ingres because it offers a complete, full featured relational database management system (RDBMS) with a suite of options for easy access to information. Actian Ingres also offered greater ease of administration than competitive products, which would enable Bucap IT personnel to spend more time focused on other technical opportunities.

To facilitate customer access to the database, the Bucap IT team used Actian OpenROAD to build a customer-facing portal. Its intuitive design enables customers to manage and access their archives directly instead of having to engage a Bucap staffer to search for and retrieve documents. As a result, the cost of providing access to archived information dropped dramatically. Concurrently, because customers could access materials faster and whenever they needed them—even in the middle of the night—customer satisfaction with Bucap’s offerings, already high, rose even higher. Compared to traditional internal archiving solutions, the security, flexibility, and any-time access that Bucap offered was much more attractive.

Benefits

The combination of Actian Ingres and Actian OpenROAD has enabled the IT team at Bucap to develop, adapt, and customize its document management and back office software application offering to meet continuously changing business and customer needs.

“The application has grown alongside the company and customer demands,” says Rinaldi. “We’re continuously adding new functionality and are managing ever-greater volumes of data. We’ve also taken advantage of the fact that Actian Ingres runs on multiple platforms, which has enabled us to capitalize on the insight and experiences we’ve gained to manage information in other systems used within our company.”

The decision to adopt Actian Ingres has produced a number of positive impacts for Bucap:

• The company has been able to in-source critical administration skills, including database administrator (DBA) and database system administrator (DBSA).
• It has been able to test the new releases of Actian Ingres in order to grow and consolidate its internal skills.
• It has gained a high degree of flexibility when it comes to managing core services and adapting processes to meet the ever-changing needs of customers.
• It has achieved a level of database availability and reliability that enables it to guarantee uninterrupted operations and access to customer services.

Today, Bucap is recognized not only as a complete provider of data archiving and storage offerings, but also as a company capable of offering highly customized and specialized services to meet unique customer needs. It operates eight storage facilities in Northern and Central Italy, housing more than 1,000 linear kilometers of physical documents and more than 500 million digital documents. On any given day, Bucap customers retrieve more than 4,500 documents while digitally archiving more than 68,000. At the heart of this solution lies Actian Ingres and the supportive relationship that has evolved between Bucap and Actian over the course of many years.

“Back in 1995, Actian offered solutions that better met our technical and financial requirements than any other company on the market,” says Rinaldi. “And so it has remained. We are very satisfied with Actian Ingres, as well as our relationship with Actian and Actian Services. We have been able to achieve all our goals and, thanks to Actian and the Actian Ingres database, our business is on solid ground. We are in a great position to develop new and innovative products in response to the challenging business opportunities presented by our customers.”