Evolving to the world of Retention Lifecycle Management

By Simon Taylor, Senior Director, Information Management, CommVault Systems Inc.

Understanding the value of your information is critical for modern organizations. Delivering incremental approaches that organize and relate information to real business problems and initiatives is the only way to keep pace with today’s competitive landscape. The past 30 years have seen many different approaches to information management that ultimately end in the same way- with separate silos of information created to suit different business purposes without a thought for cohesion or unification. These solutions were built on vendor product portfolios with little integration or insight into the “whole picture.”

“Retention Lifecycle Management is a compelling concept that could fulfill the promises made but not fully delivered by ILM because unifying software that brings together business records, regardless of the source, into a singular information foundation from the onset has been hard to find. Being able to leverage a common repository across all data types with added intelligence and automation facilitates the flexible retention of all records based on business needs and governance requirements.”
-Sheila Childs, Director of Storage Strategies and Technologies for Gartner

WHAT'S DIFFERENT?

Traditional approaches are now set to change with the introduction of Information Governance. Information Governance is a concept that pulls together key capabilities that organizations need in order to manage risk, improve efficiency and ultimately improve the value of their information. It's about revolutionizing the way organizations build and implement an overall information management strategy, one that addresses both Compliance and Legal Risk by focusing on delivering incremental benefit without compromising end-user productivity and access.

THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE

You've no doubt heard about Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). The trouble with this phrase is many people ended up disillusioned by the failed promises of vendors to deliver on its core tenants namely classification by conception, consolidation of proliferation, enablement of exploitation, management of revision, enforcement of retention, and eventual disposition.  Quite a list.  Why did ILM approaches fail then?  Well put simply this was twofold. Firstly they were top down leading to too much invasion of key applications and systems. Secondly the technology of the time wasn't integrated. The result was of course limited adoption, a process predicated solely on the end user, the creation of multiple silos of records and no thought for duplication across the Enterprise.

In contrast a new approach bottom up approach is emerging, one based on the consolidation of acquired data as an end point strategy.  A place where information can lifecycle to until its death. This is the world of Retention Lifecycle Management (RLM). RLM is a modern development of the traditional values of Information Lifecycle Management but with a core focus on the understanding that long term retention and seamless business access are the primary drivers. RLM is a policy driven approach to the granular deduplicated retention of records. In other words, enabling the preservation of business records by deduplicating them from the source, whilst classifying and aligning them seamlessly to retention policies. Records are consequently managed from a single source across all locations, media and public or private clouds from the cradle to grave.

BE SELFISH - WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?

When thinking about Information Governance it is important to ask yourself some questions specifically "what's changed" and "what's in it for me"? Modern unified approaches including those from CommVault specifically Retention Lifecycle Management (RLM) are revolutionizing and defining the way organizations quickly and efficiently adopt better Information Governance. Organizations usually have many projects on the go that relate to information governance, however many of these projects are managed and delivered in isolation of each other even though they have common goals in mind. Unifying the way you classify and retain information for the long term irrespective of storage media and how you adapt it, whilst providing seamless business access changes all this.

Unification IS simply the elixir to the best in class economic retention of records.

Another way of looking at this is by role.  The typical measurable benefits that can be expected through consolidated approaches to retention lifecycle management include:

• CIO - Reduced long term cost of retaining information with improved business access
• Records Manager - Compliance with company polices and improved records organization
• General Counsel / Legal - Single click legal preservation for reduced litigation risk and customizable evidence management to suit company specific legal processes
• IT Manager - Excellence in infrastructure and resource operational efficiency with flexibility in storage management today and for the future
• Human Resources - Improved employee & company records retention, with ease of corporate access in cases of dispute resolution.
• Compliance Officer - Conformity with industry regulations on records retention with adaptable supervision and monitoring of exposure events
• Application Admin - Ease of application management reducing the burden of business access and retrieval of key information records.
• Knowledge / Search Worker - Intuitive role based access to information through a virtualization of information records across the enterprise enabling improved sharing of workgroup content

THE SOLUTION IS OUT THERE

CommVault® Simpana 9®'s Information Governance Framework delivers a step by step bottom up approach that enables organizations to move steadily and measurably to a unified information governance solution focused on retention and access. This is achieved without invasive or restrictive processes and traditional procedures that prohibit essential access to information by key business individuals. Simpana 9 is very different and offers the following Information Governance benefits:

• The retention of unstructured records aligned to flexible policies
• Management of key workflow's including eDiscovery, preservation, and compliance supervision
• Reduced privacy breaches and exposure events across the enterprise
• Reduced cost of information retention and access through embedded global deduplication
• Conformance to legal and industry directions on information retention and process

What makes CommVault Simpana 9 revolutionary is that enables the better governance and retention of records through its unified forms of acquisition or even through records promoted directly to it via its new service connectors.  Whether information is acquired by backup, archive, replication, snapshots or cloud ingestion the approach Simpana takes to the consolidation and deduplication of records is consistent and uniform across the Enterprise. The result - records ownership without relying on the end user, a consistent way of applying retention and classification policies bottom up across all data managed by Simpana and of course unrivaled economics in terms of reduced cost of ownership.

Biography

Simon leads CommVault's Information Management business focusing on solutions that cover Information Governance, ILM, eDiscovery and Compliance. He has influenced the development of a range of solutions in data retention, archiving and enterprise search over the last 10 years, working for or with some of the leading companies in this field.