The ability to implement policy that governs retention, disposal and the storage management of information with respect to its value is central within ILM.
What is ILM?
The volume of corporate data and information has exploded over the last number of years driven by an increase in electronic documents, compliance regulations and corporate governance. Most organisations recognise that they cannot simply continue to store and then blindly manage data of all types on expensive primary storage. IT administrators must also consider storage solutions that meet their retention, preservation and retrieval requirements but also manage the lifecycle of data with a consistent and standard process. As a result, Information Lifecycle Management or ILM has become a critical business goal that many organisations hope to achieve over time.
ILM helps organisations to define a storage management strategy to manage the growing amounts of stored information and allow for the creation and enforcement of retention policies that determine how long specific types of information, documents or records are stored. The ability to implement policy that governs retention, disposal and the storage management of information with respect to its value is central within ILM. ILM provides a centralised view of all stored information and the ability to set retention policies allows storage administrators to meet the relevant corporate governance or regulatory compliance standards. ILM not only reduces the cost of storing data but also improves how organisations can securely control and access information.
- The majority of fixed content is unstructured. Organisations require new techniques & tools to improve search, discovery, management, security, and storage.
- IDC believes that by 2010 while enterprises will create, capture, or replicate about 30% of the digital universe, they will have to address security, reliability, and compliance for more than 85% of this content.
- New rules such as legal discovery of documents are driving companies to formalise document management policies, develop archiving standards, and institute policy changes.
- ESG estimates that organisations will retain over 57,000 petabytes of data over the next three years to meet regulatory, litigation mandates and business initiatives.
SoftCo Storlife reduces the cost and complexity of managing information by controlling data through a centralised view of all stored content and determining the optimum way data should be managed and accessed at each phase in its cycle. SoftCo Storlife enables companies to protect, retain, access, dispose of and prove the integrity of information being stored. SoftCo Storlife aligns business demands with the IT infrastructure that is required for improved and faster access to accurate information.
SoftCo Storlife reduces data duplication across the storage environment but it prevents unauthorised access and misuse as information is only disclosed based on successful authentication. This not only optimises storage and performance but in many industries is needed for regulatory requirements.
Using SoftCo Storlife, organisations can deploy ILM policies that accommodate:
- increases in the volume of corporate data
- centralised view for managing data and assigning policies
- improves storage efficiency with Single Instance Storage (SIS)
- provides secure online access to information
- implement retention and disposal policies regardless of its location
- guarantees content authenticity and integrity
- protects data with authorised access rights
- reliable information backup and recovery
- reduce storage infrastructure costs
Read more »