7.5 Corporate Asset Management

Increasing numbers of companies have become reliant on the data residing within their storage infrastructure. Applications rely on it, and key transactions depend on the ability to store and retrieve critical pieces of data throughout the business life cycle. Thus, organizations must begin to treat their storage capacity in the same way they would analyze, protect, and manage other corporate assets, such as a factory or real estate. After all, the data that resides on the physical disks and tape within the storage infrastructure represents the collective intellectual input and output of the entire company. In today's information-driven economy, these assets are too valuable to leave unprotected or poorly managed.

7.5.1 Capitalizing Corporate Data

Organizations must be compelled to keep the storage infrastructure well organized as well as protected in order to take advantage of the information that it contains. A company gains tremendous operational agility when it creates a system that is easy to mine for key data and information. This ability can create exceptionally high levels of knowledge sharing and transfer across all segments of the company and will enable the firm to be stronger than the simple sum of its parts . A company in a competitive market will recognize a clear operational and competitive advantage over the rest of the market if its IT staff can focus on mining the key data sets instead of simply minding the health and welfare of the subsystems. This represents the concept of capitalizing on those unique corporate assets.