30 minute interview

“ILM is a continuous journey”

HP is bullish about its Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy. Subroto Das says that its ILM offerings will find many takers in India.

Are enterprises adopting ILM?

Subroto Das Director, Information Lifecycle Management, Asia and Pacific & Japan, StorageWorks Division, HP Australia Pty

ILM is a strategy that helps organisations capture, manage, retain and deliver information as per its relevance to a business. Organisations generate three types of data—transactional or operational, transitional and reference data. Operational data refers to information generated by online systems within an organisation and accessed frequently. Transitional data is important but not required very often—for example, invoices or purchase orders—and is stored on inexpensive devices. Finally, there’s reference data, which is important but does not need to be viewed often. Managing all this data is important and that is why the concept of ILM is gaining in popularity.

What are the steps involved in an effective ILM strategy?

ILM is a continuous journey for an organisation. The initial step involves discovering what kind of data an organisation is generating and what relevance that data has to its business. Secondly, based on the type of data, a storage medium has to be selected. Then, based on the relevance of data, it is moved to a less expensive medium. While going in for an ILM strategy, systems need to be put in place to ensure that data is retrieved quickly from whichever tier of storage it is placed in.

What are the challenges faced while going in for an ILM strategy?

Organisations have myriad documents, which have not been digitised and are in a paper format. These documents include paper bills, purchase orders and the like. Now the challenge is to capture all these papers and digitise them in order to store the relevant data associated with them. Then, the challenge is to segregate the data based on its importance and finally store it on different tiers of storage. Besides this, we have observed that there has been a phenomenal growth in the amount of e-mail that needs to be archived and stored by compressing it as per requirements and not storing heavy irrelevant attachments.

How relevant is ILM for Indian enterprises?

In the present scenario, the relevance of ILM has increased manifold as far as Indian enterprises are concerned. Many Indian organisations do business in the US and they have to adhere to the regulations in force there, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act which requires organisations to archive e-mail. Then there are Indian organisations that wish to reduce their TCO and have an effective ILM strategy to ensure the optimum utilisation of storage assets. We have also observed that a number of organisations in the health segment are also into medical archiving and have combined their HIS (Hospital Information System) with their picture archival systems. These hospitals generate a large amount of reference data, which needs to be stored and managed properly.

Is ILM popular in the Asia-Pacific region?

Australia and New Zealand are early adopters of ILM. They have gone in for ILM based upon their willingness to implement new technologies and on the basis of their trade links with organisations in the US. In South East Asian countries such as Singapore and Thailand, adoption has been driven primarily by compliance and regulation. In India, Korea, China and Taiwan, there is considerable awareness.

—Abhinav Singh