Information lifecycle management (ILM) refers to creation and management of storage systems on computing devices.
ILM consists of the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure in the life cycle of information.
ILM Policy: Storage and information policies that drive management processes.
ILM Operational: It includes backup, data protection, disaster recovery, data restore, data restart, data archiving, long-term retention, data copies, and day-to-day processes and procedures necessary to manage storage architecture.
ILM Infrastructure: It includes the logical and physical architectures, storage platforms dependent applications, storage security, data center constraints.
ILM Functionality: For the purposes of business records, there are five phases identified-
- Creation and Receipt – process to deal with information from its creation.
- Distribution – Process of managing the information
- Use- Process to use of information.
- Maintenance- It include process such as retrieval, transformation of information.
- Disposition- Process to handle with unnecessary or unused information’s.
Data or information stored in storage system have a specific life cycle in between data created to data destroy.
ILM is used to apply certain policies to effective information management. This practice had its basis in the management of information in paper or other physical forms such as photographs, audio or video recordings etc.
ILM related to record management. ILM includes every phase of data “record” from data’s beginning to the end of life cycle.
ILM documents the data or information in paper work. Which helps in future audits of business needs.
What is the need of ILM
- To reduce the cost of data storage.
- To minimize the legal and agreement risk that may comes with data.
- For best or most effective data utility.
- To improve data quality.
- To improve data security.
- To control use of data as per data policy.
- ILM reduces legal liability by ensuring that data is stored securely and is not is not in use for longer than is needed.
- Data that is kept too long costs the organization unnecessarily and creates liability. It also enforces agreement policies, thereby preventing audit fines.
Some of the activities involved in ILM
- Main activity is database archiving.
- Test data management
- data privacy/data masking.
- data removing.
- Data minimizing, simplifying, securities are general procedures of ILM.