What are practices for managing enterprise data archiving?

As businesses grow, they accumulate large volumes of historical data from databases, applications, customer records, and business operations. Keeping all this information in primary storage can increase costs and make storage management more complicated.

I'm looking into data archiving solutions for enterprise environments and would like to understand the best practices for designing a reliable long-term data management strategy.

Some of the areas I'm interested in include:

• Storage optimization: How do you determine which data should remain in primary storage and which data can be archived?

• Data security: What security measures are important for protecting archived business information?

• Retention policies: How should organizations manage data retention and deletion requirements?

• Data retrieval: What should IT teams consider when they need to retrieve older records quickly?

• Backup and recovery: How should archiving work alongside existing backup and disaster recovery systems?

• Scalability: What should businesses evaluate when planning for several years of data growth?

For IT professionals who manage enterprise storage, what approaches have worked best for balancing long-term retention, accessibility, security, and storage efficiency?