What Do I Do With All This Stuff?
Comments (0) I have a system for keeping stuff in my house. When not in use most of my stuff ends up piled on the floor in my home office. When that fills up I move it to more permanent storage: my basement. When that fills up? My attic and garage are the final resting place of everything I may need someday that I need to keep…just in case.
Finally, I run out of space to put stuff. Then comes “the purge.” After a great deal of blood, sweat and (sometimes) tears I end up with a curb full of garbage bags.
Did I need to keep the stuff in the first place? Sure, some of it. Should I save my girls’ baseball mitts for next spring? Absolutely. Should I save that umbrella stroller? Three years ago, maybe. Now my kids won’t even fit in it. The point is some of the stuff I store I retrieve and use. The rest of it “expires.”
Companies are no different. For companies, “stuff” is information. Like any living entity, information has a lifecycle: it’s born, it has a useful life and it dies. For information, death means no longer being relevant or useful. Companies are great at creating information and pretty good at protecting it while it’s relevant. The problem usually comes with knowing when to let it go.
For more than half a century information management methodology has focused on making sure we can “get the data back” while ignoring the question of “do we really need it anymore?” There are acres of warehouses filled with magnetic tapes protecting a company’s valuable information assets. How much of those “assets” should really be in a garbage bag on the curb?
In comes Information Lifecycle Management.
There is a growing trend in corporate circles to attempt to reign in the pervasive data sprawl that has come about as a result of cheap real estate a.k.a. disk space. As data center costs increase with no limit in site for the amount of data being generated, IT departments are asking corporate management to buy into retention strategies. Whether it’s email, collaboration suites, or data warehouses, there is more and more urgency being assigned to the need to manage the Information Lifecycle.
In the coming weeks I will review some relevant topics in Information Lifecycle Management including:
- Backup Retention Policies
- Record Schedules
- Data Security
Have a specific question? Let me know.
Themocracy