|
How's Your Archive? Do You
Really Care?
By Jeff K. Porter, Senior Technologist, Information Management Solution
Group, Office of the CTO, EMC Corporation; Chair, SNIA Data Management
Forum
How's your archive? Do you really care? Your answer to the second question
will pretty much indicate the importance of long-term information retention
in your organization. A recent
survey conducted by the SNIA Data Management Forum (DMF) found:
- Less then 50% of business people believe they get value from their
long-term information archive
- Over 80% of business and IT think the cost of long-term archiving is
too high
- Business management does not value archive work
Ok, no big surprise. Archives don't seem to provide an obvious business
value: they cost too much to maintain, and most business people I know don't
arrive at the office in the morning dying to know how their company's
archive work is going. These attitudes have relegated archiving to
non-business critical status for years.
Changes in the business environment (regulatory compliance, legal risk
and sustained high data growth rates), improvements in digital archive
technologies and development of a new interface that allows applications to
search, access and migrate fixed-content data across heterogeneous storage
environments are creating a renewed interest in archive - and compelling
reasons for you to care.
The Time-Horizon of Business
Business people typically focus on the next 30-90 days. Whether it's closing
the sale, meeting production quotas or implementing cost control programs,
business managers are keeping one eye on stock values and the other eye on
hitting short-term goals to reach bonus targets. Ask a business manager to
spend time and money to store and manage last month's, last year's, or
three-year-old data - and you'll find their cell phone just keeps them too
busy to sit in a planning meeting.
IT is not much better. Operations folks are planning new system rollouts,
storage system upgrades and worrying if backups and disaster recovery
processes are working. Most of the time they think - "hey, if all the parts
are moving, and application up-time requirements are being met, we're doing
our job." The database architects are just trying to keep up with growing
storage needs and with planning space for the next new application coming on
line.
Who's Managing the Information?
So who's responsible for managing the businesses information? The IT group
moves bits and bytes around and deals with data streams, file systems and
table spaces. They rarely, if ever, talk about the value of the business
information in the space they manage. Who determines when business records
should be purged, what should be preserved and for how long? The SNIA DMF
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!
Another 14% of respondents said they leave the decision to IT. I have
great faith in the work ethic, technical knowledge and the sincere interest
of IT people to implement solutions to support their organizations (I have
to, I've been doing just that for over 25 years). I also know that 95% or
more of IT people have absolutely no idea about the value of the information
they are managing, or if the information should be preserved or destroyed.
The 14% of survey respondents counting on IT to manage their information had
better take another look at their planning practices.
21% leave information preservation decisions to the business groups. It
is interesting to contrast this with the finding that 80% of business
respondents thought their archive costs were too high. Do you think if they
got involved they might help drive down the cost while raising the value of
the archives? You bet.
It is worrisome that only 15% of companies get legal involved, and only
25% get RIM personnel involved in information retention planning. These are
the business areas that are tasked with understanding how compliance and
e-discovery issues affect the business. Business, legal and RIM understand
the value of the data and the requirements for information retention and
preservation. Security and IT understand how to create solutions to meet
retention requirements. If these groups are not collaborating, your business
is wasting time and money, and it is at risk of fines and judgments for
operating in non-compliant environments.
How Long is 'Long-Term' for Archives?
The SNIA DMF survey asked, "what does long-term mean?" and found some very
interesting results. Based on survey responses:
- 80% of respondents have information that must be kept more than 50
years
- 95% of archivists define long term as greater than 50 years
- 75% of records managers defined long term as greater than 21 years
- 65% of business respondents defined long term as greater than 21
years
- 64% of IT personnel defined long term as only 7 to 20 years
You can argue over the time period findings, but the magnitude of the
disconnect should not be ignored. Business, RIM and archivists are viewing
long-term information preservation from a completely different perspective
than IT folks.
IT is responsible for developing and implementing technical solutions to
address business requirements. They should be driving the collaboration
process while it is working to document business needs and architect
solutions. This survey clearly shows information retention planning is not
happening as a collaborative effort.
Data Growth, Cost and Complexity
The Merrill Lynch annual data growth rate forecast of 50% continues the
trend established in 2002. In the past, hardware, software and system
advances have helped deal with data growth - in the next few years, already
over-stretched IT operation staffs will simply be overrun by growing storage
and data management needs.
The high cost of maintaining this growth rate on tier one systems - the
most expensive to operate due to performance, recovery time, recovery point
and disaster preparedness requirements they serve - cannot be absorbed by IT
operating budgets.
Addressing the Triple Threat
It is clear that the IT industry has entered a new era. Data growth rates,
compliance regulations and risk of legal action have created a triple threat
to the data center and the business it supports. Existing practices are not
enough to deal with the combination of issues. As one survey respondent
elegantly stated "Remember that IT doesn't own the information. RIM, Legal,
Business units and IT all have a part to play in the decisions applied to
business records and should be sitting down at the table together." The SNIA
DMF has been working on promoting collaborative business practices for a
number of years and defines archive in the context of long-term digital
information, as "…a collection of information objects retained in a
repository designed to protect, control, maintain integrity, and guarantee
access over their required retention period." (visit http://www.snia-dmf.org to view the full
text).
Digital archive solutions can help data center operations address this
triple threat by reducing operating costs and providing compliant storage
environments for long-term digital data. Some people still think an archive
is placing a tape in a cave - it's not.
The implementation of proper archiving practices will remove data from
tier one storage faster, therefore reducing the size, cost and complexity of
operating these environments. It will maintain appropriate business
information in an immutable, searchable method, and it will ensure data
deletion at appropriate times. So the next time you are asked if you care
about your business' information archive, you now know the reasons you
should!
The SNIA Data Management Forum
The SNIA Data Management Forum is a cooperative initiative of IT
professionals, vendors, integrators, and service providers working together
to conduct market education, develop best practices and promote
standardization activities that help organizations become
Information-Centric enterprises. Areas of focus include the technologies and
services that support information lifecycle management, data protection,
information security and long-term digital information retention, and
preservation. For more information, visit http://www.snia-dmf.org. Find a passion.
Get involved.
References:
About the Author
Jeff K. Porter, senior technologist in the Information Management Solution
Group at EMC Corporation, has over twenty-five years experience in a variety
of technology disciplines including engineering, product management,
consulting, customer service and technology management. He is an active
member of SNIA and is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the SNIA Data
Management Forum. |
