Information lifecycle management (ILM) captures, manages, stores, preserves, delivers and disposes of an organisation's data aligning the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective storage infrastructure.
Not a new concept, information management has been used by records and information management professionals for well over three decades.
However, information management in South African companies ranges from not knowing how to proceed and storing everything, to those suffering from the "ostrich syndrome".
International analyst firm Yankee Group suggests the current surge and hype around ILM is primarily driven by regulatory compliance requirements. There is an upside to this scenario as most organisations will be in a position to address, or redress, their record management requirements, which have been neglected for years.
All information in a storage network has a specific lifecycle, from the time it enters an organisation's system to the time it is archived or removed from the system. Some information has a finite lifecycle - where the data is eventually removed when it becomes outdated - while other has an infinite lifecycle if the information remains valuable over time. The key lies in defining the balance of what has to be stored and at what cost, against a strategy supporting the business objectives.
Most of today's vendor solutions revolve essentially around storage, which typically include any combination of SAN (storage area network), NAS (network-attached storage), DASD (direct access storage device), COLD (computer output to laser disk) and magnetic tape. New technologies drive down the cost of storage per megabyte while increasing the capacity per square inch.
Unfortunately, current IT storage practice is not by any means ILM, as it is classically known. Many storage solutions, such as HSM or tiered storage, do not administer data through its complete lifecycle. In our opinion, ILM should be part of an overall approach of enterprise content management (ECM). ECM leads to ILM, which results in record and information management.
As an anecdote, an executive from the British Nuclear Agency explained once that their main issue was to ensure critical security information would survive for over 200 years. They ended up choosing paper as the best legacy medium.
An ECM approach should address a triple challenge.
First, a company needs to be able to adequately capture, manage, store, preserve, deliver or dispose of data despite the fast-paced growth of information volumes.
It also needs to address the legacy of the infinite lifecycle data, with concerns such as content integration with open standards like ODF being used, to ease migrations and avoid emulations or loss of critical data in the future.
Finally, lifecycle management strategies need to be inclusive, not only focused on core company data housed on key servers, but must also extend to the desktop. It must be practically impenetrable within the constraints imposed by the organisation and enable the right level of access to the right people. Primary storage solutions are the most expensive per megabyte, but they also offer the greatest availability.
In essence, ILM is a business analysis of the trade-offs between cost and availability that should be considered in the broader context of ECM. This involves aligning IT infrastructure with business objectives and recognising that the value of data changes as it ages.
For more information, contact EOH on (011) 607 8100 or visit www.eoh.co.za.
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