¶ … Lifecycle Management
Information protection and its management has become the most vital task encountered by IT organizations as information's value to the business can vary depending on the data type and its present stage of its lifespan. The importance of applying Information Lifecycle Management -- ILM technology lies in correctly managing information subject to its relative importance to the enterprise at a given point of time across its lifecycle. It is crucial to note there that ILM is not just a storage-based methodology, but covers a wide-ranging contents and records management system as well that are leveraged to assist in dealing with corporate and regulatory data preservation and safeguarding governance needs. Hence data becomes information when its content is capable of being used within a context. (Stuart, 2005)
The ILM implementation Roadmap:
The ILM roadmap consists of various stages which an enterprise must pass for an appropriate ILM policy. The stages are (i) information assets and infrastructure resources/services identification (ii) standardization of information, data & security services (iii) Piloting of ILM-based solution stacks (iv) Automating ILM-based policies and services and (v) Deployment of ILM practices enterprise wise. A diagram showing the various stages is given in Exhibit-I. (Peterson, 2006)
A trade-off is a likely fall out between people responsible for storage and those responsible for its instant use. Since ILM is still in its infancy and gradually evolving, it is important to note that a one-stop solution might not be what we are looking for. A single solution to address this entire issue might be hard to find if not impossible and therefore it might be prudent to look for a range of solutions each unique in its own concept and applicability. A multidisciplinary approach will be able to offer a viable solution and it is within this ambit that we will discuss the currently available tools and concepts for a solution. The following paragraph gives an overview of the currently available tools and utilities within whose framework we can address this issue.
(1) Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM):
HSM offers a solution among others to classify data based on their frequency of use within the enterprise and allow for automated data movement from older media categories to current ones. Currently, transition of data from older to newer media can be done at regular interval through an automated process, permitting enterprises to rapidly gain new cost benefits. When an organization has a better grip regarding the manner in which businesses processes and information interacts, HSM concepts can be used as per a set policy to move data that which not been accessed for 3 months or so to a lesser cost media like tape or disk. Till the point data meets this criterion, no data is moved till the data pool attains its maximum value. Thereafter based on computer logic inside the HSM software, some amount of data which has fulfilled the ILM policy is moved to create space for new data. In this manner, based on an enterprise's ILM policy, storage costs are kept low satisfying IT managers while accessibility and data needs are fulfilled also much to the cheer of operations manager as well. (Stuart, 2005)
(2) Automated Classification:
With the intensification of data explosion, the completely automated rules-based categorization approach has been popular, for its exclusive capability to speedily scale to handle projects of any size. Usually applying this approach implies formulating and applying generic rules like deleting any document that has not been edited during the past decade. But the fully automated approach has some inherent problems. This is because this approach depends on an overall, blanket rules for making a judgment on content, the outcomes often has a lot of negatives. The greatest drawback of this approach is that it eliminates humans from the decision making due to a rule-based solution. This is because following framing of a rule, there is no scope for expert input, or interpretation that can neither be acceptable to IT managers or Operations managers. (Storage Insider, 2012)
The propriety solution from Recommind's suite of data management utilities,...
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