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Vijay Pradhan

You can't treat all the data you have the same. The business value of information changes over time. It also depends on how frequently you access it and what impact it has if it disappears.

BUSINESSES today feed on information. They live, thrive and pass away based on how they juggle data across their own organisations, their customers, their suppliers — in fact, anyone participating in a business transaction with them. Information exchange, as a Gartner or a Forrester would tell you, is the life-blood of a progressive enterprise.

But that's an oft-quoted cliché, some might object. Okay, we all are facing data deluge and we all agree that managing this growing stockpile is critical to our business. But the big question is: What strategic and tactical steps do you take to face the flood and funnel it to your advantage?

There's no single answer to that question. But here's a simple and straightforward one: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). The concept provides a company a way of addressing the entire gamut of their data storage, management and retrieval needs in the most intelligent and efficient manner.

There are four building blocks of ILM: Storage, management, replication and integration. What an ILM strategy does for a company is deliver the right data on the right device at the right time in its lifecycle at the right price at the right service levels. That seems quite a mouthful, but broken down into its elements, it means an organisation cannot — or should not — club all the data it has into one watertight compartment and treat it homogeneously.

To elaborate, consider two different pieces of data: the profile of an ex-employee who left the company three years back and the preferences of a highly profitable customer. It immediately becomes obvious that the latter is more important to the company and, consequently, must be managed comparatively more efficiently and securely.

Why do that? Why not treat all data on a par? Again, the answer is simple. Even though the cost of storage per se has been coming down all these years, it is still high in proportion to the growing quantum of data and still higher when it comes to managing it. The fact is, the growing complexity of storage devices and software has given a company a very diverse — and differently priced — mix to choose from.

So, what ILM aims to do is design solutions that move information from one device to another while ensuring that all the information is stored at the appropriate price point, taking into consideration the preferred service level, or recall time. ILM takes care of data storage, retrieval and archival in its `lifecycle' — right from its `birth' through its `existence' to its `burial'. It centres on the principle that it is the information's business value that counts. ILM acknowledges that the business value of information changes over time and depends on how frequently it is accessed and what impact it has on the business if it ceases to be available. An ILM-based solution stores data, retrieves it and retires it according to how valuable it is to the business at any given point of time.

In order to benefit from ILM, an enterprise should evaluate and devise a plan for all four elements:

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A different look at data

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