Controlling Information Protection Costs

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One goal of ILM is to control the cost of protecting information while providing maximum protection. Some factors associated with the cost of protecting information are

  • Performance. Faster access costs more.

  • Availability. It costs more money to ensure high levels of availability.

  • Scope. Scope denotes how much information must be protected.

  • Duplication. Money is wasted when duplicate information is protected.

ILM policies can be used to limit all these factors. By knowing the value of the information, the organization can adjust the performance and availability of the systems used to provide protection. Moving information from a Fibre Channel SAN with Fibre Channel arrays to an iSCSI SAN with SATA arrays may cost less. The performance and availability of the iSCSI SAN/SATA systems are less, but that's fine for less valuable data. Instead of buying more expensive infrastructure, the organization uses less costly infrastructure.

With ILM, the organization makes decisions on what is important information and what is not. Certain classes of information will be deemed unworthy of any protection at all or of only the most rudimentary protection. Solid ILM policies will allow organizations to narrow the scope of what is to be protected and what is not. With less to be protected, not as much money is allocated to new protection and storage resources. This helps control infrastructure costs.

Duplicate data is not the same as duplicate information. The same information may exist in many forms throughout an enterprise. Different data can then hold the same information. ILM policies help decide when information is a duplicate of existing information and which form should be protected. Again, this helps limit the scope of what is protected and what is not.

Most data protection strategies have a one-size-fits-all philosophy. Data Lifecycle Management begins to break out of that paradigm by imposing an age-based model for data protection. ILM takes this a step further and looks at the information for guidance. ILM policies act like medical triage. They determine which information needs what resources and how soon. The organization can then focus its resources on the most valuable information.

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    Data Protection and Information Lifecycle Management
    Data Protection and Information Lifecycle Management
    ISBN: 0131927574
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 122

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