Computerworld - In the next three years, we will see more change in the storage industry than we have in the past 10, with the industry rapidly evolving and embracing information life-cycle management (ILM). A typical large company today has hundreds of applications, terabytes of online information, close to a petabyte of data on tape and almost no ability to optimally match the value of specific information at any given point in time to the type of storage resources managing it. The results can be overinvestment in the protection and availability of noncritical information and leaving critical information dangerously exposed. ILM is the optimal management of information throughout its life, from creation and use to archiving and disposal.
Changing information requirements
Today, the amount of information that organizations need to manage and use is immense and growing rapidly. As information becomes an ever more important aspect of our lives and our businesses, it becomes increasingly subject to business, legal, regulatory or personal requirements. Information has to last longer these days (outliving any single server, storage device, operating system or application). The value of data changes more frequently, too (and often unpredictably), but it must be readily available to provide new opportunities for growth.
At the same time, new regulations now govern how long business-related e-mail and Internet communications need to be retained and how quickly they may have to be retrieved. Industry research has uncovered that in the U.S. alone, there are close to 10,000 state and federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Department of Defense Standard 5015.2 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, governing the storage, availability and disposal of information.
As the value of information changes, it makes sense to move data to different online and off-line storage media that provide the right levels of protection, replication and recovery at the lowest possible cost.
Information management today
IT managers are offered a plethora of storage management tools to help them cope with the challenge of managing the unpredictable, changing information requirements. These tools have solved many data management, movement and replication challenges and have successfully tackled many data preservation issues. But the overall management of information hasn't been addressed in a consistent and systematic manner.
Exacerbating this challenge are the "islands of applications" dominating the IT landscape. Information management today revolves around a few key enterprise applications, each with its own information management tools, metadata and interfaces, and involves large expenditures of resources applied to the ongoing integration of these separate information management infrastructures. When a new business requirement gives rise to new information policies, separate and parallel efforts go on simultaneously to apply them to each and every one of these key applications.
A new approach
To get the most value from their information at the lowest total cost, organizations are taking a close look at ILM. The goal is to meet business requirements across a wide variety of applications, regulations, user needs and corporate policies while delivering the lowest overall cost.
A successful information life-cycle management strategy must be:
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