Data Doesn't Retire, It Just Gets Cheaper to Keep
Veeam, Friday, November 6th, 2026
Veeam argues that decade-long data retention rules in Asia Pacific require automated tiering rather than static tape or cold-storage decisions.
Retention rules across Asia Pacific, such as Singapore's patient lifetime plus six years and 10-year requirements in Japan and Indonesia, now outlast storage hardware, contracts and the administrators who set them up.
Veeam says long-term retention fails quietly through process gaps like outdated tiering rules or stopped manual offloads, so it should be an automated lifecycle moving data from performance to capacity to archive tiers by policy.
Tape is still growing, with LTO shipments up 57% in Q1 2026, but Veeam argues its manual handling is the weak link.
Data residency is also less of a barrier to cloud archives, with Gartner forecasting sovereign cloud IaaS spending of $80 billion in 2026.