Controlling information storage costs may be in the CARDs
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2005 6:00:00 AM
At some point, "The information you're storing becomes less important than the price you're paying to store it," contends Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions at IT management consultancy Forsythe, Skokie, Ill. For many companies, that time could be arriving soon as the amount of data created and stored every year grows exponentially, along with demands for legal documentation and accountability across the enterprise.
These trends are leading to growing interest in the nascent discipline of information life-cycle management (ILM).
Sometimes rolled into the larger category of enterprise content management, ILM is defined by the Storage Networking Industry Association as "the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition."
In practice, this means key information that needs to be accessed often is stored on the highest-speed—and generally most expensive—media, where it is easily accessible. As time passes, and the data is accessed less often, it is moved to less expensive, slower, less accessible media until eventually it is either permanently archived or discarded.
But ILM is more than a tiered-storage strategy. It involves not just infrastructure, security, and integration issues, but also policy, compliance, operational, and business-continuity questions, demanding what Croy calls "a fiscal and fiduciary balancing act."
Tony Lock, analyst with Bloor Research, Towcester, England, says the challenge of implementing ILM begins with detailed knowledge of a company's storage platforms, their performance, and security characteristics. But added to that—and harder to get—is an understanding of the business value of the data and regulatory issues that cover its storage and retrieval, and an agreement about appropriate levels of accessibility, availability, protection, and response times that apply to the data.
Analysts at Forsythe suggest the CARD—Creation, Access, Retention, Deletion—method to develop a workable ILM strategy. For each piece or category of data, ask: Why did we create it? How often to we need to access it? How long will we need to access it regularly? How secure does it need to be? How long do we need to retain it? When can we dispose of it? Answers will relate to not only IT storage, but also cost, compliance, business-process, and continuity considerations.
Definitely not an out-of-the-box solution and still evolving as a concept, ILM—or at least its various components—will get more attention as companies continue to grapple with data storage, retention, and compliance issues.
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