Developing an ILM strategy

Information Lifecycle Management or ILM as it is known popularly is perhaps the most important aspect of any organization today. This means that every organization needs to think over how it wants to handle its data right from the time it is created to the time it looses its value.

With the kind of data growth we are witnessing, it is becoming even more important for the organizations to understand how frequently they need to access the data, and how long do they need to retain that data.

Compliance regulations are one of the driving factors to define the overall retention period and business practices help define the criticality of the data.

It is for this reason that I believe that ILM is more of a business function than a pure IT function. In Indian context, you can co-relate this with the VAT authorities. If they have a query of current year data, they call you same day or next day. If it is a couple of years old case, you get 15-20 days to respond to every query and if it goes to 5-6 years old data, sometimes the case goes on for another year. Even they don’t ask for more than 10 years old data.

The only difference is that the business owner stored his sales files earlier at different locations based on their age and now on different disks and storages based on the same factor. The driving factor has always been the criticality and compliance for that data.

By categorizing your data into active and non-active data, and based upon the urgency of its availability, you can store this on tiered storage. This enables you to store the most recent and critical data on your fastest and most accessible devices (or cloud), and retire the rest to archivals, thereby saving both cost and resources.