"Archiving is an industry in transition," said Laura DuBois, program VP, Storage Systems, Software and Solutions at IDC. Backup application suppliers seek to embed more archiving value-added functions to preserve the customers and the revenue base. Standalone archiving solutions are vulnerable to cloud archiving services. Legacy approaches to archiving including backup applications and tape are still in use but are on the decline as more firms seek faster and more sophisticated access to archive data for not only compliance and eDiscovery but also data mining and analytics. In the longer run, it is likely that the intelligence as to how data is managed, what policies it is under, and where it is placed in a storage hierarchy, from host-based cache to a cloud-based object storage or somewhere in between, will increasingly be absorbed into the storage infrastructure itself.