Is Real ILM Possible? (continued)
Not Just an IT Issue
"ILM requires collaboration among business users, records-management people, IT, legal professionals and security groups to determine the true value of that information for the business as it moves over time," says Porter. But such collaboration is difficult to achieve. "Any ILM initiative will fail unless all these people are involved, and committed," says Porter.
In a perfect world, companies would create a set of data-centric business policies that could have technologies that would automatically enforce them. "For example, if we said, 'no MP3 files on the corporate servers,' we could apply tools to seek out MP3s, delete or move them, and notify the users that they had violated corporate policy," says Dupulessie.
Indeed, on the technology side, products that support ILM are finally becoming available to do just that. Tiered storage products have been around for some time, but several other types of software, particularly data classification and master data management (MDM) systems, are emerging that promise to support ILM initiatives.
Over the past 18 months, a number of companies -- mostly small startups -- have released data classification products that can evaluate information value and automate movement across storage tiers based upon business policies. Right now, these things are largely being done with home-grown scripts, but EMC, Scentric, Abrevity and Kazeon Systems, among others, are marketing commercial data classification software that supports ILM. (article continues)
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