The Great leap Forward
The Great leap Forward
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is something of an omnipresent phrase in the IT industry at present, but what exactly is it? Stuart Finlayson talks to some of the leading players in the ILM space to find out what it means to users and how it differs from what has come before.
Some years ago, a term was coined in the storage industry to describe a new way of more cost-effectively store data. That term was Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).
The reason I mention this is that there is a (relatively) new term relating to the storage and management of information that has swept across the IT industry in the last few months to such an extent that almost every vendor that has anything to offer in relation to the storage and management of data has come forth with a strategy with which this particular term is central to their plans. That term is Information Lifecycle Management.
So what does ILM have to do with HSM? Well, HSM was something of a forerunner to ILM in that it addressed the issue of where different types of information should be stored in relation to their importance and ease of access. While ILM does cover the areas defined by HSM, it goes much further, to cover a multitude of other functions pertaining to the management of information.
Mark Heers, National Product Manager Australia/New Zealand, EMC, explains how ILM takes the storage and management of information to a new level."HSM addresses the archival/migration of information- from primary storage to tape or another archival technology. Information Lifecycle Management is about the proactive management of information, so in addition to archival and migration, it also addresses how you upgrade applications, how you do testing, what data is fixed and unchanging, how you back it up, restore it, provide access to it, adhere to compliance rules and what the recovery point objective (RPO-how much data can be lost) and recovery time objective (RTO-how quickly something needs to be recovered) is, all of which vary over the life of the information. Hence, HSM forms one small part of ILM."
It would seem therefore that contrary to what some cynical observers may consider to be a rehashed and renamed version of HSM, ILM is so much more than that, and those whose purpose it is to espouse the value of the new way of managing information are keen to see that this message is driven home to users.
"HSM really needs to be viewed as addressing only one element of ILM; that which allows customers to store information on the most cost effective storage medium," says Ian Selway, Product Marketing Manager for Networked Storage Solutions at Hewlett-Packard. "To think of ILM as a glorified version of HSM is, I believe, to miss the point. "IT organisations today face many challenges in managing data from its creation to its deletion-how is the volume of data managed; what policies does the company need to consider when thinking about data retention; and how does one find a piece of information in what might be petabytes of storage capacity.
"An ILM strategy will actively manage information throughout its life based on its changing business relevance and usage over time. This will be achieved by utilising policy-based storage services to automate the management of information based on service level objectives. Finally, it's important not only to manage the information, where and when it's needed, but also at the appropriate cost. ILM will accomplish this."Tony Hughes, Australia/New Zealand Managing Director of content management systems provider Hummingbird, agrees that HSM is only a small component of ILM, adding that ILM has a vital part to play in helping enterprises achieve regulatory compliance.
"Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) incorporates HSM and goes well beyond simply applying cascading technologies (high availability hard disk through to off-site tape, etc.) to manage the cost of electronic storage of data and documents. Information Lifecycle Management is focused on maximising the value of information whilst minimising business risk and achieving full regulatory compliance. This is achieved by combining business processes with document and records management software and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solutions.
"An effective ILM strategy focuses on increasing the value on information by making it easily available when needed whilst also reducing the risks associated with keeping unnecessary information. ILM solutions protect, share, classify, retrieve and dispose of information securely and efficiently throughout the organisation. By implementing an ILM Solution, organisations increase the value whilst reducing risk and costs associated with their information. ILM is about business process and good governance. HSM is about technology and reducing storage costs."
An important aspect of ILM is the way in which a well thought out ILM strategy can allow enterprises to control what information is stored where, who has access to it, and record who has made changes to documents.
The elimination of multiple copies of the same attachment taking up valuable storage capacity can be eradicated too, ventures Andrew Antal, ANZ Manager of Marketing and Alliances at content management solution provider Interwoven.
"To give a specific example, how do customers handle the growing email exchange today? Some throw more storage at the problem, while others employ an email archiving solution to address the email attachment problem.
"The fundamental problem with this is the duplicate handling of the attachments. Instead of holding multiple copies of the same 20MB attachment, why not employ an email management system which holds one copy of the specific attachment in a common workspace. At the same time the workspace can track who has access to the attachment, the changes and who made edits to the attachments."
A problem that exists within the IT industry at times is that tendency on the part of the leading vendors to flog an idea or a concept (such as ILM, utility computing, etc.) until everyone is heartily sick of hearing about it. The tendency then is for the mention of such concepts to lessen, before being subsequently replaced by the next big idea.
ILM, on the other hand, is set to become so intrinsic to future corporate governance, that this fate-according to the leading vendors-will not befall it.
"Increased government and industry legislation is certainly the most powerful driving force of keeping ILM on organisation's radar," believes Hummingbird's Tony Hughes. "Document and records management initiatives are common and mature implementations are now adding integrated search and discovery technologies. As organisations are becoming more transparent, the issue of authenticity and the ability to provide the substance behind transactions is becoming paramount."
HP's Ian Selway goes further. "What a cynical thought! A number of factors have come together to make ILM very relevant to businesses today. These include new regulatory directives in the wake of some high profile business failures, together with the need in some vertical industries to comply with regulations such as patient records, or email retention policies. As a result, organisations have recognised that they will need to retain information for much longer periods of time, and as such the volumes of data needing to be managed with grow exponentially and this will make it challenging in the future to find specific pieces of information. The analogy of a needle in a haystack springs to mind.
"ILM as a buzzword may well drop off the radar map, but the requirement to implement the key elements of ILM (data management, retaining data for future use and being able to find reference data within the overall information stored) will remain. If well implemented within an organisation, an ILM approach to the company information pool will be fundamental to that organisation's future success."
A key point in those remarks by Selway is "if well implemented within an organisation." It is critical that when an organisation is looking to set up an ILM infrastructure that clear policies on how information will be handled and stored are established from the outset, which is where it can get very complicated. But once such policies are aligned with the ILM system, data should be diverted to the appropriate area of the system automatically, leaving no room for human error or individual interpretation over what should go where.
"Managing & controlling the value of information throughout the organisation may prove to be a long and expensive process for many companies," says Hummingbird's Hughes.
"This is because the process required for a fully functional ILM system is to define, manage, track store and classify all information and data across the organisation may prove to be prohibitive. However, companies that approach an ILM solution as a modular approach starting a DM, RM or KM solution will achieve faster results as the classification of documentation and change management process will already be achieved."
The key challenge, believes Interwoven's Andrew Antal, relates to understanding who owns the document and the independences across various departments. While Antal is of the opinion that it is relatively straightforward to set up document profiles as part of an ILM implementation, it is when the system is in commission that the management complexity occurs.
"For example, how do you manage documents which have not been edited or modified but are important from a viewing perspective? The owner of a document might be in the financial department, but the particular content is extremely important to members of the HR department. How do you classify and track this interdependence? What you will find in this instance is that this document will be relocated to secondary storage or tape. This ultimately affects the retrieval time and productivity of the user, wanting to view the information."
HP's Selway agrees that policy-based activities are probably the most challenging aspect of an ILM strategy.
"Firstly the IT organisation will need-in conjunction with the business-to classify the various types of data. There may also be a requirement to separately classify data created by key individuals within a company, for example, the information generated by a CEO or CFO.
"Once this classification has been accomplished, a common framework for control of both operational and reference data can be deployed to manage the information as it is created."
Much of the complexity of establishing an ILM system can be alleviated by using existing integrated software, insists Grant Smith, Storage/Content Management Executive, IBM Software Group, ANZ.
"Understanding the business and setting appropriate management policies should be established at the enterprise content management level. Clearly, the more intelligence that can be built-in rather than user provided, the better. Various components combine to provide such facilities. An example is textual information mining. This capability enables the system to auto classify documents by performing analysis on the text and using the results to categorise the content. This knowledge can be further used to define both the records management classification and also the archival policy for the document."
What cannot be emphasised enough is that for any ILM strategy to succeed, the decision making process as to the correct handling, storage and access permission of information within the organisation should be automated, rather than left up to the individual users.
"Most users are neither interested in, nor skilled enough to decide on this process," says IBM's Smith. "Their primary concern is to perform a specific business function- customer service, fulfilment processing, accounts payable, etc. The rules governing the storage and retention of the documents they work with should be based on an organisation's business rules and be automatically derived by the systems they use, providing flexibility for user choice only where appropriate to the business."
"When ILM is fully implemented," says EMC's Heers, "the end-user should no longer be involved in the process of ensuring that information is stored correctly and available to them when needed. They shouldn't have to be concerned about whether the information is backed up or not, whether the data should be stored on storage array one or storage array two and how long to keep information to fulfil compliance regulations."
"By contrast," adds Heers, "system administrators will continue to have a significant role. However, instead of checking back ups and manually moving data from one location to another, they will be involved with entering and maintaining the information policies which guides the system into how long information remains on different tiers of data and on replication rates and retention rates."
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