The price of a qualified Electronic Archiving System (EAS) cannot be compared with that of cloud storage or file hosting. The sole purpose of an EAS is not to retain your data: it must preserve their evidential value over time, guarantee their integrity, ensure traceability, and enable their retrieval within a compliant framework. This difference in purpose explains the price gap compared with traditional storage.
A storage preserves, an EAS proves
A traditional hosting provider mainly offers availability and storage capacity. An EAS, on the other hand, organizes the preservation of your documents so that they remain legally admissible in the event of an audit, dispute, or tax inspection. The logic is therefore different: you are not simply paying for disk space, you are paying for a chain of trust.
Why a hosting provider is not enough
A traditional hosting provider generally does not offer the guarantees required to preserve archives with evidential value: it stores your files, but does not prove their integrity or their chain of custody. Nor does it typically include archiving policies, evidential logs, immutability mechanisms, or final disposition procedures expected from an EAS. In other words, storage addresses a technical need, whereas an EAS addresses a legal and organizational need.
The components that truly drive the cost
A qualified EAS includes capabilities that standard storage does not provide: sealing, timestamping, logging, access management, integrity controls, retention policies, controlled disposal, and faithful retrieval. NF 461 certification specifically attests that the system complies with the requirements of the NF Z42-013 standard regarding the availability, integrity, confidentiality, and traceability of electronic archives. These mechanisms involve technical, human, and organizational costs because they must operate reliably over long periods of time.
How is the pricing justified?
The pricing of an EAS should be assessed from a value perspective rather than a simple volume perspective, taking into account the following elements:
- Reduction of legal and tax risks ;
- Guaranteed long-term preservation of evidential records ;
- Complete traceability of deposits, consultations, and retrievals ;
- Preservation of document integrity without alteration ;
- Controlled retention and destruction policies ;
- Reliable retrieval in the event of an inspection, dispute, or audit ;
- Reversibility and service continuity ;
- Demonstrable documentary compliance through a recognized standards framework.
Ultimately, you are not funding simple storage space, but rather the long-term protection of your information assets and your compliance posture.
A significant legal responsibility
Arclib does not merely provide infrastructure: it assumes responsibility for preserving your sensitive documents and for their evidential retrieval. In this context, compliance is not a marketing argument but a verifiable requirement, particularly through NF 461 certification and the requirements associated with NF Z42-013. The price therefore includes audits, controls, records governance, and the ability to demonstrate compliance over time.
The value delivered by Arclib
You are investing in risk control. With a qualified EAS, you reduce the risks of losing evidence, document alteration, missing documents, regulatory non-compliance, or difficulties responding to an inspection. You also benefit from retention policies, irreversible destruction rules, and stronger service continuity than with simple shared storage. In practice, the cost of an EAS often replaces much higher hidden costs: manual searches, file reconstruction, litigation, organizational disruption, and exposure to financial penalties.
Conclusion
A qualified EAS costs more than simple hosting because it does not address the same need. While a hosting provider stores data, a qualified EAS protects the legal value of documents, secures evidence, and supports the organization in achieving documentary compliance. The price therefore reflects a trusted service, not merely a storage line item.
A hosting provider stores files, whereas a qualified EAS preserves evidence.
While a hosting provider charges for storage space, an EAS charges for compliance, traceability, integrity, and long-term preservation.
Contact us to learn more
Contact our experts to assess whether your archiving solution meets the requirements of a qualified EAS.
