In other words, ILM is the strategy for ensuring information management costs are contained and the most important information assets - those that contribute to the growth and innovation of your business are identified, cared for and exploited to maximum effect.

With ILM, you get the most value from information at every point in its lifecycle. ILM lets you access and mine information to enrich and streamline business processes, identify new revenue opportunities, and remain competitive. It helps you keep your TCO low by optimizing your storage - recognizing that you can't afford to treat all information the same anymore. And ILM ensures fast access to the critical information that your people or possibly regulatory agencies and lawyers need immediately.

ILM is not just about storage, a well planned and implemented ILM will enable businesses to ensure they are treating the right information properly and to know which assets to exploit.  Only by adopting an ILM strategy will businesses ensure they are aligning their resource optimally, based on value.  Implementing an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy needn't require a major corporate effort or financial investment. Many targeted ILM initiatives contribute to an overall reduction in the cost and complexity of managing information over time.

But then again, ILM is not just about saving money.  It is what you do with the cost savings that count.  Now that you can identify your most important information assets and provide the right level of service for them, you can focus on harnessing them for the innovation cycles that your business goes through.  For example, you can invest in collaborative technologies, competitive intelligence systems and other content-centric applications that focus on your top-line rather than your bottom-line.  ILM allows you to address the exponential information growth before it swallows the majority of your I.T. budget and your human resources.

By establishing a single, tiered storage infrastructure you can place applications and information in the appropriate location - according to business value. This approach facilitates consolidation of infrastructure management and operational tasks. And your organization benefits from the time and cost savings of improved efficiencies and increased automation (Classes of infrastructure; Information placement; Storage management automation).

With this, you will now be able to address the two key variables of content management systems: compliance and control.  Compliance has become a key focus in nearly every industry, driven by industry and government regulations and through corporate governance.  Control on the other hand is the process of ensuring the right information is made available to the right people at the right time.  As part of an ILM strategy, the requirement to identify information the needs to be kept and archived is paramount.  A policy-driven I.T. architecture will help ensure that right information is achieved and allow an organization to response quickly to regulatory scrutiny.

Information moves from creation through management to deployment and then to archiving or destruction.  Information also moves back and forth throughout this cycle as well, with its value and importance changing as it goes.  ILM plays an important role in ensuring the availability and access metrics are achieved for the information, commensurate with the service levels agreed upon for that type of information assets. 

ILM is the only way to deliver better access and availability to the content users who need to power their business with a lower total cost of ownership and improved levels of service and control.

Source: EMC Corporation - Where information lives.

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