Information Lifecycle Management: Cost or Risk?

Customers often ask me about ILM, and what I think their strategy should be. This is a trick question, because Information Lifecycle Management seems to have two almost unrelated meanings, one about risk, and one about cost. See also EMC's ILM story.

The "risk version" of ILM has to do with regulated data. I call it "risk ILM" because the primary goal is risk management. How do I keep my CEO out of jail? When an SEC lawyer asks to see an old e-mail, how do I prove that the data I’m showing him is the same data that was stored five years ago? If I’m required to keep data for seven years, how do I ensure that it is deleted after seven years and a day?

The “cost version” of ILM is about saving money. How do I use less expensive storage for data that has lower performance or availability requirements? How do I minimize the amount of expensive high-end storage that I own and manage? The key building block for “cost ILM” is having tiers of differently priced storage, Ideally, you’d like tools to identify “cheap data” that’s living on expensive storage, and move it off, and you’d also like tools to identify when data on cheap storage becomes more important and move it to storage with better performance or availability.

What’s my point? The reason I think this distinction is important is that these two forms of ILM have such fundamentally different goals that it’s confusing to lump them together. These two types of ILM have such fundamentally different goals that to talk about an “ILM Strategy” as if it were just one thing makes no sense.

For “risk ILM”, the strategy is to identify risks and costs. In many industries, really bad things can happen if you don’t follow the data rules. For airlines, the FAA says that if certain data is not available, then the entire fleet must be grounded. For drug companies, the FDA says that if certain data about a drug is not available, then all plants producing the drug must be shut down. Let’s not even talk about what happens when the SEC gets pissed. The strategy isn’t about saving money on IT, it’s about avoiding giant risks, potentially about staying in business.

For “cost ILM”, the only point is to save money. Compare the savings of cheaper storage against whatever management techniques or tools you need to make things work, and run the math.

Either way there’s different solutions from different vendors, but just don’t get mixed up about which ILM you are talking about.