VideoRemember those virtual pets that were all the rage a few holiday seasons back? Inanimate though they may be, the still-popular toys require proper care and feeding. Fail to provide those essentials, and you soon find yourself looking for a virtual pet cemetery.
Information is much like that: each piece has a life span that must be managed properly from cradle to grave. Failure to do so can jeopardize your company's health in a way that's anything but virtual.
Increasingly, a key part of that management challenge involves storage. A raft of regulations that mandate how companies store and protect all kinds of data, lawsuits requiring that they produce highly specific information on demand, the need to guard data when disaster strikes, and other pressures have recast storage: it's no longer viewed as an electronic filing cabinet that's largely taken for granted, but has become a key aspect of IT strategy.
While some of those pressures, most notably the dictates of Sarbanes-Oxley, initially applied only to large public corporations, their effects are already trickling down to small and midsize businesses (SMBs). These firms must manage data just as professionally as the big guys, providing easy, reliable access to some records and guaranteeing the confidentiality of others. Some of those SMBs may want to go public someday, and they'll be subject to the same regulations as the Global 1,000. And no business of any size is immune to lawsuits, major or minor disasters, or competitive pressures.
"SMBs' storage needs aren't really different than enterprise storage needs," says Nancy Hurley, a Portland, Oregon-based senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a data-storage research firm headquartered in Milford, Massachusetts. "They want to effectively utilize resources, reduce total costs, and protect and recover business information like everyone else, just on a smaller scale."
In the past, that smaller scale meant forgoing certain capabilities that large companies enjoyed. But now, an approach formerly used almost exclusively by giant companies that deal with dozens of terabytes of data is becoming available to — and critical for — smaller companies as well. It's called information life-cycle management, or ILM.
Although ILM certainly involves storage, security, network hardware, and other technologies, it's a process, not a product. Or, more accurately, it's a combination of processes and technologies that manage information at every stage of its life, based on its value to the business. A true end-to-end ILM system includes a comprehensive storage infrastructure, migration software that relocates data automatically, and products for backing up, replicating, archiving, and retrieving information.
Used properly, ILM keeps tabs on data from creation to deletion. Typically, it moves, stores, archives, or removes information with little or no human intervention, based on company policies or priorities, regulatory requirements, or automatic timetables. Ideally, it's set up so that anything that hasn't been deleted can be easily retrieved.
Behind every effective ILM effort is a solid strategy, which Hurley says businesses can develop in three simple steps. First, set a value for each type of information. In other words, figure out what the data is worth to the business and what impact its loss might have, then assign it a priority.
Next, based on those designations, figure out how accessible, how protected, and how recoverable each item needs to be. For high-priority information, such as current financial records, "it might be important to mirror the data, and also take snapshots and replicate off of those snapshots for disaster-recovery purposes," says Hurley. Less-critical information — marketing brochures or employee PowerPoint presentations — might get backed up once a week. Even that's an improvement for some SMBs, says Gary Doan, CEO of IntraDyn Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota-based maker of storage products. "Fully 50 percent of them are not doing any offsite archiving at all," he says. "They're about as vulnerable as anybody you'll find."
Finally — and this step is critical — revisit those decisions regularly. Data often gains or loses value over time; as its worth changes, you may want to adjust your strategy for managing it. For instance, if the information is worth less now than it was six months ago, you may want to migrate it to less-sophisticated (and, typically, less-expensive) storage devices.
Strategies and priorities will, of course, vary from industry to industry. For example, in the media sector, data has a short life cycle. News organizations are primarily interested in gathering, guarding, and constantly updating what they know about what's happening right now. Once they've published or broadcast that information, they typically archive it for future reference, but they no longer worry about instant access or zealous protection.
In health care, on the other hand, some information never loses value. Providers are bound by ever-stricter regulations governing not just privacy but also the long-term retention of patient charts, lab results, X-rays, and other information. John Halamka MD, chief information officer at the Boston-based CareGroup hospital network, notes that his organization is required to keep medical records for its 9 million patients for up to 30 years.
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