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Today is an exciting time for the telecommunications industry. Carriers are developing a plethora of new technologies, fanning out into previously under-served markets, and waging legislative wars to competitive products. However, they are also facing increasing competition from nontraditional sources like cable operators, media, and entertainment companies. To capitalize on the opportunities presented by this rapidly changing environment, service providers need hefty capital investments and partnerships outside their traditional lines of business. These competitive pressures, new services, and potential partnerships present an urgent set of challenges for not only managing, but profiting from the huge stores of information.

A Rocky Road
Thanks to heavy spending of the telecom boom and the subsequent doldrums of the dot- com bust, service providers were saddled with heavy debt loads. After years of cost-cutting and chasing more efficient business methods, most carriers have significantly reduced their debt. However, these companies continue to rely heavily on cost-reduction initiatives like outsourced call centers, application development, maintenance, IT operations, and billing. Meanwhile, carriers are looking to increase profits by investing in mobile divisions, acquisitions, and expanding in newer regions. Both cost-cutting initiatives and investment require high levels of data sharing and management, however, supporting infrastructure for this has lagged behind expansion.

An ILM strategy allows carriers to map service levels, applications, storage tiers and cost levels according to the current value of information.

Carriers are also making large capital investments to improve basic network quality to attract new customers and minimize customer churn. Network quality, while a competitive advantage today, is rapidly becoming the cost of entry, giving rise to the emergence of the new content-based services. These new services, which leverage investments in 2.5G and 3G broadband wireless networks, include content-based services such as ringtones, wallpapers, games, Mobisodes, IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), location-based services including those based on GPS, unified messaging, wireless backup and recovery services, and extended email services. Other developments include converged network and IT infrastructure, bandwidth improvements and broadband networks like FTTP (fiber to the premises), as well as maturing standards and delivery technologies for mobile and IP-based services. These new technologies and services require a highly secure and cost-effective data management scheme across the entire organization.

ILM and Telcos
The crucial strategy for meeting these challenges is information lifecycle management (ILM); the discipline of managing data lifecycles to meet financial, competitive and regulatory goals. An ILM strategy allows carriers to map service levels, applications, storage tiers and cost levels according to the current value of information. ILM works by matching content and storage tiers to required access and service levels, application type and business continuity requirements. These policies are cross-referenced with the most cost-effective methods of meeting those requirements while accounting for the changing value of data over time.

ILM must account for shifting value across all data volumes, since not all data changes value at the same rate or in the same way. For example, it's a false and damaging distinction to proclaim that all data will henceforth be handled by age. A three-month-old lunch invitation email will never be as important as a three-month-old engineering diagram for an important new project and neither may be as important as a six-year-old voicemail that falls under SEC-mandated retention requirements. And in telecom, the lifecycle of a regulated CDR may have a far different profile than an MMS image in a message store.

ILM operates enterprise-wide, which allows the organization to keep information available across all business domains and operations. The lack of enterprise-wide ILM is a worrisome concern for carriers who want to add new services to generate additional revenues, but who find they are relying on a limited information infrastructure. Lacking an integral method of protecting, accessing and managing organizational data, the company cannot truly know if it has the network or IT capacity to add another service. Designing a company-wide ILM procedure eliminates many of these problems and grants the flexibility and scalability needed to help grow the business.

ILM allows carriers to benefit in three ways.

• Reduce TCO: One of telecom industry's biggest data management challenges with confusing databases and database applications. Data is hard to access across systems and applications, and often does not maintain integrity during transport. ILM reduces TCO in this all-important area by consolidating and optimizing databases and applications, and by controlling the costs of storing, protecting and accessing data. ILM also reduces the number of manual procedures and duplicate hardware across the enterprise, shrinking a carrier's total cost of ownership through consolidation and improved data management processes.

Carriers often maintain two discrete computing and storage infrastructures; one for network and one for IT. The ability to converge the two infrastructures can potentially save them millions of dollars monthly. Additionally, the application of ILM to the core FCAPS data that runs the network across its lifecycle will facilitate this convergence and the corresponding reduction in TCO.

• Improve competitive advantage: Competitive advantage has many components. From a carrier perspective, the following components are critical: network quality, customer care, innovative value-added services, market-specific service bundles.

• Satisfy regulatory compliance: The telecommunications industry must observe detailed FCC data management requirements as well as a slew of other government regulations. Requirements include extremely accurate and detailed records-keeping, data retention, information tracking and the ability to accurately and quickly retrieve data by a number of different parameters. Telecom must be especially careful of data management because of the large number of FCC-mandated individual records it must keep, in addition to strict SEC and other legal measures. Complying with these regulations requires carriers to classify data, manage it across its lifecycle to comply with retention requirements, observe copy procedures, prove the integrity of data, and be able to quickly find and retrieve data using multiple search parameters across multiple storage targets. The only way to efficiently and cost-effectively meet this challenge is with an ILM strategy and technology tools.

ILM and Storage Tiers
ILM's core purpose is enabling an infrastructure that cost-effectively manages data according to its business value. A crucial approach to ILM is to match storage targets, protection and availability to that value. The table below lists some examples of different types of applications and data, and the storage tiers where they belong.

ILM strategy begins with a systems assessment, including application and data classification and workflow analysis. Assessments can start in either order: with critical applications like billing or provisioning, or with crucial workflows. The next step is to analyze infrastructure gaps to understand where shortfalls and points of failure exist and to recommend the means to close the gaps. Next, the ILM analysis defines storage architecture tiers by the level of availability and protection that is most suitable to the content that's being managed. The following step is to define data policies for enterprise-wide information management and to create and fine-tune the policies to govern data movement into and across storage tiers. The final step is to implement the tiered consolidation and begin to manage information across the enterprise using ILM tools, policies and principles.

ILM analysts and technology providers should know how to operate in both IT and network areas in order to work effectively with telecommunications companies. ILM's ability to manage data across the entire infrastructure will allow carriers to begin a significant convergence of the network and IT baseline infrastructures. This convergence will maintain the highest levels of access protection and network security, while saving carriers significant capital and operational expenditures and improving performance. Done correctly, ILM cost-effectively manages information throughout the enterprise, allowing telecommunications organizations to improve customer service, create a profitable competitive advantage, and optimize operational and capital investments.

Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC