Information Life Cycle Management

Hello friends I’m Vikalp Mishra. This blog about Information Life Cycle Management and I’m sharing not much but a little bit of information about Information Life Cycle Management.

What is Information Life Cycle Management?

Information lifecycle management (ILM) is the effort to oversee data, from creation through retirement, in order to optimize its utility, lower costs, as well as minimize the legal and compliance risks that may be introduced through that data.

What are the stages of the Information life cycle?

There are five stages of the Information life cycle.

1. Data Creation

The first phase of the data lifecycle is the creation/capture of data. This data can be in many forms e.g. PDF, image, Word document, SQL database data. Data is typically created by an organization in one of 3 ways:

• Data Acquisition: acquiring already existing data that has been produced outside the organization.
• Data Entry: manual entry of new data by personnel within the organization.
• Data Capture: the capture of data generated by devices used in various processes in the organization.

2. Storage

Once data has been created within the organization, it needs to be stored and protected, with the appropriate level of security applied. A robust backup and recovery process should also be implemented to ensure the retention of data during the lifecycle.

3. Usage

During the usage phase of the data lifecycle, data is used to support activities in the organization. Data can be viewed, processed, modified, and saved. An audit trail should be maintained for all critical data to ensure that all modifications to data are fully traceable. Data may also be made available to share with others outside the organization.

4. Archival

Data Archival is the copying of data to an environment where it is stored in case it is needed again in an active production environment and the removal of this data from all active production environments.

A data archive is simply a place where data is stored, but where no maintenance or general usage occurs. If necessary, the data can be restored to an environment where it can be used.

5. Destruction

The volume of archived data inevitably grows, and while you may want to save all your data forever, that’s not feasible. Storage cost and compliance issues exert pressure to destroy data you no longer need. Data destruction or purging is the removal of every copy of a data item from an organization. It is typically done from an archive storage location. The challenge of this phase of the lifecycle is to ensure that the data has been properly destroyed. It is important to ensure before destroying data that the data items have exceeded their required regulatory retention period.

What is ILM Strategy?

To ensure the efficient management of information, ILM should possess the following characteristics to obtain and maintain an ILM strategy:

• Business-centric: ILM should be strategized to run in parallel with the key processes of an organization, initiatives towards achieving the business goal, and applications of the business to meet both the current and future information growth.

• Policy-based: ILM should not only be restricted to be implemented in a few departments, rather it should be treated as a policy and should hold within all the business processes, applications, and resources. This can provide a holistic view of the information across multiple functional groups.
• • Optimised: ILM should move the data at a predetermined interval on the basis of its priority, demand, and requirement. Since the value of information tends to change over time, an ILM strategy should consider alternative storage requirements and should allocate different storage resources to information based on its business value.
• • Centrally-managed: ILM should hold and keep a check on all the information assets of an organization or a business.
• • Heterogeneous: An ILM strategy should cater to all the different types of operating systems and storage platforms.

What are the elements of ILM?

There are four main elements of ILM that can help an organization or business adhere to an ILM structured environment. These are as follows:

• Tiered storage management: Most of the organizations today seek storage management that can provide them the ease of storing and managing the information more efficiently. Tiered storage:

 Provides higher performance disk storage to the most recent and most critical business data and reduces overall disk-storage cost.

 Provides high-performance access to the most frequently-accessed and most recent data and speeds up the business process.

 Automatically and transparently moves the older or infrequently-used data to lower-cost disk storage and reduces administrative tasks and human errors.

Thank you for reading my blog, have a great day ahead.

Cheers,

Vikalp Mishra

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