Does your organisation have a ‘keep everything' mentality? Do you try to retain every megabyte of electronic information, just in case the regulators or legal authorities come calling?

Or have you rigorously applied information lifecycle management (ILM) methodologies to your corporate data, ruthlessly paring it down so that there is less of it for the IT team to manage?

It's more likely that your organisation falls somewhere between these two extremes. In an age where corporate governance can be subjected to intense scrutiny, many organisations feel that they need to retain vast volumes of data on both disk and tape, in order that they can account for every transaction they perform.

As a result, data centre's are full of data that in some cases is rarely accessed by the applications that run the business. And that, says Logicalis consultant Jan Zelezinski, leads to unnecessary cost and inefficiency and prevents innovation.

"The business doesn't know if it needs all this data to run the business and, likely as not, it doesn't. But it certainly needs some of it," he says. "At the same time, data centre managers end up managing stagnant data that is increasing exponentially and is reliant on power and cooling resources, which is wasteful and most definitely not environmentally friendly," he says.

What is needed is an ILM assessment - a comprehensive audit and classification of data that helps an organization understand what data it holds, where it holds it, and how frequently (if ever) that data is retrieved once it has been stored.

From there, the business can apply a value to the data it needs and IT can apply storage management policies to the different categories of data. The data can also be assigned to different types of storage medium, some of it low-cost, according to the likelihood that it will be needed again.

"In this way, the business decides what it needs, so that data centre managers can manage what IS needed and get rid of what IS NOT needed," says Zelezinski. "That makes them more efficient, so they can focus on improving performance, automate mundane tasks which should give them more time to innovate and create new services.

"ILM is what needs to happen to help free up the Data Centre -- but it should be driven by business requirements and NOT by the needs of IT," he concludes.

Your Comments and Questions

Jan Zelezinski, 7 months ago

If you start with the SNIA definition for ILM “The process of managing information,from creation to disposal, in a manner that aligns costs with the changing value of information” then this may help you understand what an ILM audit involves. It has many facets and requires discussions with different functions within any organisation that handle and are responsible for information and data. It does involve software tools and specialists at various stages and the process can take a number of routes depending upon the specific environmet that requires audit but the underlying goal is to create a process for the management of information through an organisation and a technology platform to support it.

George Black, 7 months ago

Sounds like a good idea, but what does an ILM audit actually comprise of, and how long does it take? For example, does it require third-party specialists and/or dedicated [software] tools?

Victoria Furness, 7 months ago

If ever there was an issue that the business and IT parts of the organisation had to communicate over, this would be it. I think a large part of the problem behind data overflow in organisations is that the IT team has not highlighted it is a growing problem to data users and business users have not been made aware of what they can do to minimise the problem. An ILM assessment sounds like a good way of formalising the process, but I doubt this is yet common practice in most organisations.

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