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Information management is the buzzword in this new age of information overload. A recent study by the University of California says that the production of new information has increased by 30 percent each year from 1999 to 2002. Almost every aspect of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information format. According to the researchers, the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years.

The researchers also report that electronic channels such as TV, radio, the telephone and the Internet, contained three and a half times more new information in 2002 than did the information that was stored on media. It’s no surprise that the development of effective, reliable and cost-efficient strategies to store data is of increasing interest, and not just for commercial companies or for students downloading music.

 management of the relentless growth of structured and unstructured data.

Effective information flow is the lifeblood of successful business operations, driving competitive advantage in terms of reduced cycle times, lower operational costs and expanded revenue opportunities. Information Management (IM) is a model for managing an organization’s information, based on business requirements related to effectiveness (i.e. business continuity) and efficiency (i.e. total-cost-of-ownership). New business drivers and regulations have added new requirements to the different types of information like e-mail, CRM data, and all types of long-lived customer records and business documents. IT organizations face major challenges in meeting the information protection, availability and accessibility requirements of these business-critical systems in the face of rapidly expanding user loads and exponential data growth. With their comprehensive solution suite, storage vendors have unique ability to help customers maximize business continuity while minimizing total cost-of-ownership via ILM strategies.

Information Management (IM) is required for ILM which means that IM:

• Organizes information
• Enables easy retrieval
• Ensures protection and recovery of information
• Keeps applications running—to improve business productivity and minimize downtime
• Simplifies management of storage components

IM Opportunity
Storage management capabilities are not able to keep pace with storage growth despite declining storage infrastructure costs and IT budgets. Given increasing amount and value of data, there is an information management gap.

As Enterprise Storage Group also puts it, ILM is quickly becoming the buzzword of the storage industry. As new regulatory rules are created, and the number of disaster recovery implementations increase, ILM will play a pivotal role in helping IT professionals adhere to new standards while incurring minimum management headaches.

What’s important to remember is that IM is not a technology. It is a combination of processes and technologies that determines how data flows through an environment. By doing so, it helps end users manage data from the moment it is created to the time it is no longer needed. It is the ability to automatically match the right data asset with the right storage asset is becoming very critical. Many companies are implementing a combination of these technologies and processes to enable a successful IM practice.

Analyze Usage Patterns
Before undertaking an IM project, an organization must understand how data is used and its value to the organization at any point in time, based on the business requirements for a specific application. This helps an organization uncover the business value related to the combination of data and applications—it is really this combination that defines information. The starting point is to understand the types of data associated with each application – structured (e.g. databases), semi-structured (e.g. e-mail), or unstructured (e.g. files). In addition, the organization needs to determine whether data is transactional—meaning that it changes or is updated frequently—or referential—meaning that it remains largely unchanged through its life. It is also important to recognize that data may change from transactional to referential during its useful life.

Seven Key Capabilities
User can identify seven key capabilities or components of a comprehensive Information Management solution that need to be evaluated when managing information through its life-cycle. Implementing an IM strategy for an application and the information associated with it may involve only a few of the components, or all of them depending on the business requirements for that application. The first stage in implementing IM is gathering a thorough understanding of the business needs related to information. This requires tight communications between all stakeholders who derive value from specific information sets, as well as the IT department. Requirements that should be defined include budget, business process and access requirements, regulatory and risk management requirements, and service level objectives related to availability, recoverability and protection of the information. Once the business needs for given information set are defined, you can then determine requirements.

• Collect/Organize: In what formats (paper, electronic files, print output) does information exist today and how will you collect and organize them?

• Access/Share: How will users access the data, and what are the requirements for sharing information within the organization and with external users?

• Monitor/Remedy: How should the application and data be monitored to ensure availability under the service level objective? In addition to monitoring, the solutions should be able to proactively remedy situations that could impact availability, based on pre-defined policies.

• Replicate/Mirror: Should data be duplicated for disaster recovery? Should this be done locally or remotely? An organization may want to make a real-time copy of production information—either locally (mirroring) or remotely (replication.) By combining replication and mirroring with monitoring software, an organization can proactively failover to a secondary system while the primary system is being remedied/repaired.

• Protect/Recover: Where and on what devices should information be stored? What operating systems and other systems are involved and how should information be protected?

• Migrate/Archive/Destroy: What needs to be stored on fast disk, and what can be moved to less expensive storage with slower response times? Sometimes, information will reach the end of its usefulness and should be deleted.

Storage Software Solutions
Storage software products can capture and index information in the form of documents, images, print streams or many other formats, and stores these files. Even email or instant messages can be captured in real-time and provides indexing and storage.

Traditional products can be used to backup and recover information from heterogeneous systems, and supports a wide range of storage devices and topologies. They take advantage of disk as a backup target, snapshots for immediate recovery, and tape for long-term storage and vaulting. To protect you from system or software failures, storage software proactively monitors systems and relocates services locally or remotely as needed. It also replicates Windows data to alternate sites to support disaster recovery.

With storage software, users can search for and access information from desktop, browser or application clients. Relevant information is retrieved from storage devices and made available through the client interface.

User can also automatically migrate information to less expensive/slower storage devices based on predefined policies, such as type and age of information.

Some of the software products can help organizations manage retention periods associated with information, so that data is not inadvertently destroyed. They also track tapes throughout their life including when they should be recycled or destroyed.

How Can IM Benefit Customers?
Let’s use a financial services company listed on the Nasdaq or NYSE as an example in exploring the potential benefits of an IM approach. Our example company has e-mail, a transactional database and a file server with contract information. These different information sources have different data types, service level requirements, and retrieval and recovery objectives.

Further, the company wants to follow recently issued guidelines from the SEC and Comptroller of the Treasury related to disaster recovery. The transactional database needs to be maintained on local fast storage, with periodic snapshots taken to reduce the risk of data loss, and to allow for backup without transaction interruption and recovery from disk when necessary. Email information has retention requirements based on SEC and NASD regulations. These regulations require that email messages and attachments be archived for a period of several years in an easily accessible way.

Finally, the contract files need to be retained for the life of the contract at a minimum. Contracts are rarely modified, so they can be saved on lower cost, slower storage, but they must be accessible to the contracts department on an on demand basis.

For disaster recovery, the company wants to set up a secondary site with a copy of critical data that they could switch to automatically in the event of disaster.

Why IM Approach?
There is need for an application focused IM approach, which provides the following.

Retention: Don’t "throw the baby out with the bathwater"; can’t keep everything; can’t throw everything away

Access: Keep it electronically

Recoverable: Centralized for ease of access & bolster evidentiary value

Searchability: Find it for business and legal purposes ASAP

Value: Understand it’s value over time

Storage expert Steve Duplessie describes IM as significant a business process as CRM and ERP. An effective IM implementation can significantly streamline costs and management efficiencies. IT organizations can actually use IM processes to more effectively implement CRM and ERP solutions, ensuring that critical data is given top-priority storage resources and is always available.

IM is an ever-growing and evolving process. In order to realize the benefits of the IM process, IT must continuously review the usage patterns of its storage resources and ensure adherence to policies and procedures. By taking advantage of the new tools, monitoring the process becomes easy.

New advances in ATA and SATA disks will play an important role in helping IT administrators with IM, giving them the ability to stage backups and snapshots inexpensively. Storage software innovations have also increased the ability to identify data, classify data and move data to the proper location over time.

Once IT can begin showing executive management exactly how their assets are being used, it will be in a position to properly assign charge backs to the various groups in an effort to turn itself into a profit (or at least break-even) center. Now is the time to start planning.

IM is not a product, it is a process—a strategy to help you manage your information to maximize its business value to your rganization.

PK Gupta director, strategic-development Legato Software (a division of EMC)