ILM brings Confidence to Your Compliance

June 26th, 2006: What exactly is 'Information Lifecycle Management’? Hewlett Packard’s StorageWorks Marketing Manager, Ian Selway, gives HP’s definition.

Numerous regulations apply to Australian businesses, detailing the length of time that records must be kept and made accessible. Furthermore, as a result of a number of high profile company collapses, auditors are now scrutinising financial records and company accounts in a more intensive manner. Equally stakeholders are seeking assurance that senior executives within the business are acting responsibly and in an ethical manner. Information is the lifeblood of busiensses today, and company executives cannot remain ill-informed when it comes to making critical buisness decisions. Technology solutions like Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) help by getting the right business information into the right hands quickly; improving competivie advantage by empowering employees with the knowledge they need to quickly make the right decision. ILM can also help by freeing up IT resources to focus on more strategic inovative projects.

ILM In A Nutshell
Growing amounts of data coupled with reducing infrastructure costs, mean management challenges in organisation and storage. As information passes through its lifecylce, it typically has differing levels of critical business value and relevance. From its creation, through to storage, retrieval, analysis and eventual destruction of records, information needs to be managed according to its business relevance. Implemented well, ILM is a fast and operationally efficient retention and retrieval solution that mitigates risk, reducing storage and compliance costs while improving business productivity.

Governance Challenges
Unlike the US, here in Australia regulations on information retention are not quite as onerous. The challenge of meeting complex regulatory, legislative and audit demands for specific information is one of the more intricate compliance issues. A variety of corporate laws stipulate that financial and business records are retained for defined periods of time, up to seven years for most industries, as many as 25 to 30 years for particular records in the mining and medical industries. By better managing the complexity and sheer mass of business records, ILM can assist in meeting these regulation requests both faster and more accurately.

The Email challenge
Analysts suggest that 80% of an organisation’s intellectual property is now transmitted using email as legitimate business records. In many companies, email is now so important, it’s considered a business-critical, if not mission critical, application.

Technologies like email present a management paradigm: how can an organisation enable the free flow of information across its systems, yet retain the control measures to ensure it is effectivaly monitored, managed and archived in accordance with good business practice.

Steps To Success
Perform a data profiling exercise on your information to discover content types and assign meta-data based on the business value and policies surrounding that information. The next step is to identify the four or five most critical business applications in the organisation and then map the relevant information types to those applications. These are your critical data types which should be then kept on the fastest most secure storage discs.

Automation and continuous availability are final key steps of an ILM project. It’s not practical for an organisation to continually assign data relevance manually to all new information created. Once ILM rules are in place, data movement can be automated by business policy.

ILM From Another Angle
If a business is struggling with the “data deluge” which has descended upon the modern world of commerce, then what hope could it have in meeting the increasingly demanding information requests from regulators for specific information? By consulting with customers at the outset of a project, HP helps organisations understand why particular data is key by drawing on experience in business policy and best practices.

A company’s board and executive management must be able to access critical data quickly and have trust and confidence in that data. Effective ILM helps meet compliance and governance challenges. It will also enhance security, efficiency and business performance. HP’s ILM solution architecture enables the capture, management, retention and delivery of information at every stage of its lifecycle, and in a way that reduces costs, saves time and minimises risk.

that come up tops every time.

So, how do you go about encouraging what is, essentially, a cultural change in your organisation?

Billion Dollar Brains
As enterprises embark on server centralisation plans – against the backdrop of business regulation, overhead minimisation and stronger security – application acceleration will emerge as a crucial enabler bridging the benefits of centralisation and user experience. Integration of WAN and data centre optimisation solutions allows acceleration of the widest cross-section of business applications, improve delivery options, and providing unparalleled monitoring and reporting tools to track performance. And the market is quickly realising their benefits.

Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan has estimated a rapid 30 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the Asia Pacific application front end acceleration market (2004 to 2011), becoming a billion dollar industry by the end of that estimated period.