‘Business Processes Hold the Key’

Business

Need for ILM



Focus Area



What are the implementation levels of ILM in Indian enterprises today? Are

enterprises ready for ILM? What are the business needs for adopting ILM?

CIOs Feedback



Many companies today have data archival and housekeeping policies that

stipulate how long a particular type of data resides in live systems and when

and how is it migrated to archival systems over a period of time. Then there are

companies in IT services, which face no need for data migration or even to store

data for a long period of time–they are actually required to destroy data

within a stipulated period of time as per customer demands! Even as cost of

physical storage keeps falling, the demand for storage is so high that total

spending is still increasing. The real issue in storage is people-related costs,

which can go even 3-5 times of physical costs at times. With ILM, in the long

term you are targeting management costs. With structured data like ERP and CRM,

it is easier to manage. With unstructured data–emails, X-rays, content images,

it is difficult to search and find data. Backup and archiving is going to be

difficult, and as a result the cost of retrieving data is huge.

Besides, much of the logic for moving data from one system to another often

lies within the application itself. For example, SAP keeps data live for 2 years

and then rolls it off (for archival). At present, there are not many

organizations that talk of end-to-end automation of data migration.

"Using ILM in an elementary way, we are focusing on workflow driven, operational management of data" "We moved all our data for previous years to secondary storage, to speed up our OLTP systems" "ILM is more of a process related to identifying and classifying information, rather than relying solely on technology" Dinesh Chandna CIO, Hindustan Times Arindam Bose Head-IT, LG Electronics SR Balasubramanian VP IS, Hero Honda Motors

Intelligent

Data Management



Focus Area



How does one take steps towards adopting ILM? At what stage can an

organization claim that it is practicing ILM? How does one take full advantage

of ILM?

CIOs Feedback



ILM is more of a process and a policy-based framework than something that relies
on technology. It is not a product that you buy and implement. Policies and

procedures are where the core lies–policies on control of generating fresh

data, when to move data from live storage to secondary storage, and when to

dispose it off, if at all. And it is business requirements that lend to policies

and procedures. The technology is just an enabler. These policies are in turn

defined by unique business needs.

"Use management tools and ILM to define the broader framework of business processes of your organization" "Get the policies regarding information classification in place, automation will come easily" "The future of storage is not about point products and solutions, but integrated approach" Rajeev Seoni Head IS, Hughes Software Systems Sachin Kapoor Enterprise architect–service delivery platforms, Bharti Televentures Stephen Lloyd-Jones VP—APAC, Legato Software

Once the policy is there, automation comes easily. To take an example of an

enterprise in media industry, there are different types of data–from email and

transactional data to content, news stories, pictures and advertising images.

The applications generating these disparate types of data often have built-in

logic to move data from live storage to offline or archives.

While applications with structured data, like ERP and CRM have their own

sophisticated architecture for data management (archiving, data warehousing),

increasingly most of the data is being generated outside those structured

systems, for example email, scanned images of documents in digital format. And

this unstructured data is the biggest challenge facing organizations.

My Kind of ILM

Fortis Healthcare is a healthcare chain operating super specialty hospitals

in multiple locations in India. The chain has adopted Picture Archiving

Communication System (PACS), for storing and accessing digital images of X-rays,

CT scans and other such reports. A keen believer in power of IT for better

patient care, chain’s head of IT Sunil Kapoor talks of the integration of ILM

principles in the patient care system active at Fortis.

"Patient records (images of X-rays and CT scans for example) are kept in

live (primary) storage as long as the patient remains admitted in the

hospital," he says. A consulting doctor can access a patient’s images

through his desktop whenever he is interacting with the patient. The moment the

patient is discharged (the notification comes from the billing side of system),

the image records are automatically moved to secondary media, which is DVD

jukeboxes.

As an X-ray image is taken, it automatically moves to the reporting station,

to the concerned radiologist. The moment the radiologist reports it, it moves

automatically to the web-server, which makes it available on Intranet for access

throughout the hospital chain across the country.

Data Retrieval: In the OPD scenario, when a patient fixes an appointment, the

system identifies and matches him with available records and if a record is

found, it automatically identifies the specific DVDs that contain the relevant

images. Working in tandem with an appointment booking software, it generates a

daily report at the end of the day so that the operators can go to the library

in the morning and load the relevant DVDs. Through this secondary storage, the

images are once again made available on consultant doctor’s desktop when the

time to see the patient comes.