Should You Build or Buy a Data Archiving Solution? Here’s What To Consider.

As low-code platforms make in-house software development more accessible, many businesses are considering this approach for various projects, including data archiving solutions. If your data is growing and you’re weighing a build-versus-buy strategy for archiving, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s break down the key factors and determine which method comes out ahead in each.

Cost

When it comes to buying or building any software, the first question that will likely be asked is, “What will it cost?”. For archiving, you need to consider both upfront and long-term costs. Buying any software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution typically involves recurring subscription fees (per user or by data volume) and‌ implementation costs, offering predictable budgeting and avoiding the need for in-house development.

Building a solution, on the other hand, could get expensive. Cost considerations for a homegrown archiving solution can include employee salaries for design, development, testing, launch, and ongoing maintenance, as well as infrastructure costs.

Verdict: Buy

Customization and flexibility

When considering customization, purchasing an archiving solution usually comes with a set of pre-defined features and configurations. However, most archiving solutions offer flexibility to tailor the process to your specific needs, including the data to be archived, the frequency of archiving, and how the data is stored, accessed, and restored.

Building your own archiving solution provides the ability to customize it as well, allowing you to create a system that fits your team’s unique requirements. The downside is that you need to have in-house developer capabilities to build and maintain these features.

Verdict: Buy

Time to market

Buying a prebuilt archiving solution offers a significant advantage. These solutions can be implemented quickly, allowing you to start archiving data and addressing storage or compliance needs in a significantly shorter timeframe.

Building your own solution, conversely, requires a potentially lengthy development cycle. This includes the time needed for planning, designing, building, testing, and deploying the custom archiving system, which can take weeks or even months, depending on the system’s complexity and your team’s resources. If you need an archiving solution implemented rapidly, buying is generally the faster route.

Verdict: Buy

Innovation and future-proofing

Off-the-shelf archiving solutions provide a predefined set of capabilities designed for everyday archiving needs, including automated scheduling, various storage options, and search functionalities. 

Building your own solution enables you to incorporate tailored features that align with your unique requirements. However, most SaaS platforms release new functionality regularly (Salesforce has three major releases per year) and update its API specifications. To ensure your custom archiving solution remains compatible and continues to function as intended, your team will need to dedicate resources to regularly review, test, and update the built solution in response to these changes.

Verdict: Buy

Scalability and performance

Since archiving is inherently designed to help you manage growing data, the scalability of your archiving solution is essential. Off-the-shelf solutions are often designed with scalability in mind, with vendors typically managing the underlying infrastructure to handle growing data volumes.

Building a solution requires you to proactively architect for scalability from the outset, considering how your chosen storage and processes will handle increasing amounts of archived data over time. This includes selecting scalable infrastructure and designing efficient data management processes, which can add complexity to the build process but offers greater control over how scalability is implemented.

Verdict: Buy

Security

Whenever you’re handling your organization’s data, security is a crucial consideration. When buying a solution, you rely on the vendor’s security measures, certifications, and compliance adherence. It’s critical to vet their security practices thoroughly and understand how they handle data encryption, access controls, and data residency.

Building your solution allows for complete control over security implementation. You can tailor security measures to your exact requirements, choosing encryption methods, access permissions, and storage locations. However, this also means that the responsibility for managing security falls entirely on your team, requiring expertise that many smaller organizations may not possess.

Reliability

Reliability is paramount for any archiving solution, as it concerns the consistent and dependable operation of the system and the long-term integrity of your archived data. When buying a solution, you typically benefit from the vendor’s expertise in building and maintaining reliable systems, often with service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee uptime and support.

Building your own solution requires you to engineer reliability into the system from the ground up, including choosing stable infrastructure, implementing redundancy, and ensuring ongoing maintenance and monitoring to prevent data loss or system failures. While a custom build can be tailored to your specific reliability needs, it places the onus of ensuring that reliability squarely on your internal team.

Verdict: Buy

The bottom line

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a resounding case for buying your archiving solution.

If you do decide to go that route, consider Salesforce Archive. With Archive, you can rest easy knowing your archived data is secure and easily accessible, with audit-ready documentation that ensures compliance without compromising convenience.