Exponential growth of information is one of the biggest challenges. Information doubles every two years, and it all needs to be stored somewhere. Unfortunately, storage costs go up while IT budgets stay flat.
So said Deepak Mohan, senior VP of Symantec's Information Management Group, speaking during a media briefing at the company's Vision 2010 event, in Barcelona, this week.
“This in turn results in customers battling to meet their recovery time objectives. In addition, it makes it harder for customers to recover the information they need.”
He said the company recently conducted an Information Management Survey that revealed several key points. “Some 87% of respondents believe an information management strategy should allow deletion of unnecessary information. 75% of backups have infinite retention or are on legal hold, and 40% of backups are not even relevant to litigation.”
To compound the problem, he said less than half of organisations, 46%, have an information management strategy in place. “At the end of the day, we are saving a lot more information than we need to. The delete key is the least used key on the keyboard, this should change.”
Mohan cited several reasons for the over saving of information. “Fear of deleting. Customers feel the information could be something important to the business, such as records, contracts, or e-mails, and want to make sure it is not needed before deleting.
“Or it could be something they think they may need for legal or regulatory issues, and that the compliance people may ask them for one day. Lastly, it could be something required to recover from a disaster or other problem.
“Do we really need to save hundreds of copies of everything?” he asked. “The fact is we don't know what to save and what to delete, so we end up saving everything forever.”
The time for better information management is now, he explained. “Without it, storage costs will spiral up, customers will not meet their recovery time objectives and the cost of legal discovery will continue to rise.”
Mohan said a good information strategy should be based on four principles. “Protect completely, deduplicate everywhere, delete confidently and discover efficiently.”
To protect completely, companies need to back up, archive and prevent data loss. In terms of deduplication, he said they should eliminate redundancy close to the source.
“Although it isn't always possible, the closer to the source redundancy is eliminated the better, for example, inside file servers or virtual machines. It can be done at the backup servers, or at the destination, but if it's done closer to where the data sits, the moving of information through the physical and network infrastructure is greatly reduced.”
Deletion should be done by default, he added. “Businesses must figure out what information is important to the business, what should be saved, and more importantly for how long. Once this had been decided, an organisation can create retention and deletion policies around it.
“Put it in the rules,” he continued. “Distinguish between the needs of retention versus recovery.”
Talking of discovery, Mohan said ultimately, a company should be able to find what it needs, when it needs it, at a price it can afford.
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