Successful organizations realize the difference between storing data and managing it. The former merely approaches it from a "housing" perspective. The latter seeks to extract value from your data: making it readily available to facilitate efficient business processes and communications. Companies realize further bottom-line benefits by reducing admin overhead. Viewed from this perspective, storage management is no longer strictly an IT concern; it is intrinsic to the way your company performs and competes.
The sheer volume of excess data - whether it is outdated, of no intrinsic value, or simply redundant - adds time and hassle to information retrieval. Which, over time, can be a major drag on productivity and compromise your organization's ability to compete in today's evershortening business cycles.
State-of-the-art SRM embeds the intelligence necessary for administrators and users to prioritize and easily manage data, making what's most important most accessible. Over the past several years, there's been a lot written about ILM. ILM is a philosophy and an approach that begins with management and the IT team harmonizing goals and tactics. Working together they assign value to information and determine how to manage it by establishing rules governing what and how much is stored. The next step in ILM is to bring users into the process. While management and IT establish the overarching storage policies, users are made aware of their stake - and responsibility - in the process, and are empowered with the tools and information required to make sensible storage-related decisions. Such a framework assures that information is up-to-date and that critical information is readily available on-demand. Such a system has far-reaching implications for just about every aspect of business: from efficient and responsive customer relations to arming your sales force with the real-time information they need to be effective.
Windows Server Research Library
