What is your ILM strategy today? Is it more than archiving?
With the exponential growth rate of data in enterprise business systems, it becomes billion $ challenge to manage information to meet the legal and business mandates in the increased global economy threat today.
Legal and business requirements
Government regulations such as SOX, GLB and HIPAA require auditing of updates and disclosure at business process level.
Business mandates improved system performance, reduced risk, reduced TCO and legal compliance.
Global business units and their process leaders from each of their regional business units with the leadership of a compliance teams engage to address this challenge from all compliance (legal and corporate governance) mandates requirement to create, store, retrieve and delete – information lifecycle while improving their services to customers. Mergers and acquisitions pose additional standardization challenge.
The process we adopt to create, retrieve and destroy information is termed as information lifecycle management (ILM).
ILM little deeper
The key for ILM is the meaning and context (semantic) of data used. The alignment of this information with business processes through management of policies and service levels associated with application, metadata, information and data.
ILM is comprised of polices, processes, practices and tools (PPPT) to align the business value of information with business processes from the time it is consumed till its final disposition.
The three cornerstones of ILM could therefore be:
· Manage Database volume
· End-of-Life Data
· End-of-Life system
Manage Database volume: Data archiving processes that include categorization /analysis archive and delete, storage, indexing data access helps to address the performance area.
End-of-Life Data: Retention management process tool offers Retention manager that include maintaining retention policy (centralized retention policy management - define, maintain and verify completeness), ILM aware storage integration and legal case management address this space.
End-of-Life system: Legacy system decommissioning (including mergers and acquisitions), independently understandable archive (WORM like storage)
If you are already using ILM, it is high time that you do a cross-check on how much you could leverage on the base points above.
Additionally, I believe the following business cases would be a best-fit to implement ILM:
· Business units already using data archiving can gain more automation and streamlining through ILM.
· Business can cut costs during legal proceedings and reduces the risk of losing information.
· Mergers and acquisitions
I would be interested in knowing your point of view regarding this.
