Storage Networking Times

Issue 6, October 2007

Collaborate To Compete And Comply
Kay Mushens, Chair, SNIA Europe Marketing Committee, euromarketing@snia.org

Organisations have come to realise that information is both an asset and a potential liability. The need to remain competitive, coupled with the ever stronger demands of regulatory compliance, legal discovery, and security risks have created a critical need for organisational transformation and collaboration among records and information managers, the IT department, security professionals and business users of information. Failure to respond can expose the company to lost productivity, lost business opportunities, and loss of reputation.

In many organisations, managing risk has taken precedence over value creation as the primary objective of information management practices. This often means that far more resources are dedicated to reducing exposure than to creating new solutions and processes that confer competitive advantage. Collaboration offers a way to regain control and put value creation back on an equal footing. Organisations must do both to survive.

A recent survey conducted by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) Data Management Forum (DMF) found that:

• Less then 50% of business people believe they get value from their long-term information archive;
• Over 80% of business and IT professionals think the cost of long-term archiving is too high;
• Business management does not value archive work.

This is not surprising. Business users are not usually concerned with their companies’ archiving infrastructure; they just need information to be readily available when it’s needed. However, improvements in digital archive technologies, and development of a new interface that allows applications to search, access, and migrate fix-content data across heterogeneous storage environments is creating a renewed interest in archive, because of the increased value such capabilities place on data as information.

It is not easy to identify who is responsible for bridging the gap between raw data and valuable information. Who should determine when business records should be purged? What should be preserved? And for how long? The SNIA survey found inconsistent answers to these questions.

The good news is that 14% of survey respondents said that business records information managers (RIM), legal, security and IT collaborate to establish information retention policies. The bad news is that only 14% of businesses are collaborating to establish the value of their information, the starting point of many storage and archiving strategies. Another 14% said they leave the decision to IT. This is where the issue stems from: 95% or more of IT administrators are not aware of the value of the information they are managing, which means those organisations potentially have completely unsuitable data storage and information management policies.

Successful information-based management practices require a new type of collaboration, as information owners and administrators work together to understand and classify the business value and requirements for information. It is crucial that the strengths of all participants, including business stakeholders, IT, RIM, legal and security are understood and brought to bear in establishing best practices for the organisation. These range from establishing guidelines for how the members of the collaborative process work together, to agreeing on uniform methodologies. The following list is a starting point on which each organisation can expand.

• Corporate information policy formulation – Information policies cannot be established in a vacuum or by a single group within the enterprise; it is a collaborative endeavour involving all stakeholders. Compliance and governance initiatives are excellent and requisite opportunities for collaborative partnerships to develop, educate, and better meet policy requirements.
• The tools to implement and measure conformance to information policies – The collaborative team drives operational requirements, forms the policies that serve as governances over these requirements, and translates policies into processes with supporting management tools. All parties have a resulting stake in putting those tools into daily practice and monitoring the results.
• Identification of all information and records repositories – Organisations are struggling to manage the proliferation of information across the entire organisation and need a contribution from all stakeholders to identify all information and records repositories, their contents, and their value and relationship to business processes.
• Creation and capture of business-related metadata – The capture of business-related metadata is a critical part of the information lifecycle process, with all parties invested in the who, what, when, why, and how of the metadata capture process.
• Shared responsibility with regard to risk – It is critical that all stakeholders acknowledge and understand the risks attached to records. Records originating from both within and outside the enterprise, and formal and informal records of all electronic and physical media types, must be assessed for their value as records as well their risk potential. Specific, measurable actions should be outlined when records are stored, retained, moved, or destroyed.

In summary, to achieve information management compliance within your organisation then collaboration between the data centre, lines of business and key enterprise stakeholders such as legal, security and records and information managers is critical.

One implementation method used by many companies is ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), as a complete information-based management practice.

The Storage Networking Industry Association is currently developing two important standards in this area: the Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) for ILM services, and the eXtensible Access Method (XAM). SMI-S for ILM services, essential for automation of ILM-based practices, will allow heterogeneous services to be instrumented and driven by central ILM management tools and ILM-enabled applications. The first such specifications will appear in SMI-S 1.2.0, with more management interfaces to follow in subsequent releases. XAM provides applications with a standard interface to storage and with the capability to write metadata relevant to ILM practices.

Although both standards are still in development, there are tools in the marketplace today that can be used to implement ILM-based practices now. For example, building and automating ILM-based practices around vertical applications such as e-mail or database archiving, and implementing and automating tiering, protection, compliance, and archiving solutions using ILM management tools or utilities integrated into virtualisation platforms.

To learn more about how SNIA is working to define open technology standards and best practices in information and storage management for the Information-Centric Enterprise, visit the SNIA Data Management Forum

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