Organizations in Middle East Need to Adopt Retention Lifecycle Management for Information Governance

May 12, 2011 - PRLog -- Dubai, United Arab Emirates: As capital markets have begun to develop all across the Middle East and North African (MENA) markets, the region has been forced to move towards greater transparency and stronger disclosures and more robust governance practices. Within the gamut of of corporate governance, information management and security has been gaining increasing focus and importance.

The past 30 years have seen many different approaches to information management that ultimately end in the same way - with separate silos of information created to suit different business purposes without a thought for cohesion or unification.

Traditional approaches are now set to change with the introduction of Information Governance.  Information Governance is a concept that pulls together key capabilities that organisations need in order to manage risk, improve efficiency and ultimately improve the value of their information. It’s about revolutionising the way organisations build and implement an overall information management strategy, one that addresses both Compliance and Legal Risk by focusing on delivering incremental benefit without compromising end-user productivity and access.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) promised to provide a solution for Information Governance, but it has unfortunately failed to deliver on its core tenants: classification by conception, consolidation of proliferation, enablement of exploitation, management of revision, enforcement of retention, and eventual disposition.  ILM approaches have tended to be ‘top down’, leading to too much invasion of key applications and systems.  And the technology of the time wasn’t integrated. The end result has been limited adoption, a process predicated solely on the end user, the creation of multiple silos of records and no thought for duplication across the Enterprise.

Steve Bailey, Regional Operations Director at CommVault Systems says that a new ‘bottom up’ approach is now emerging which is based on the consolidation of acquired data as an end point strategy.  A place where information can lifecycle to until its death. This is the world of Retention Lifecycle Management (RLM).  RLM is a modern development of the traditional values of Information Lifecycle Management but with a core focus on the understanding that long term retention and seamless business access are the primary drivers. RLM is a policy driven approach to the granular de-duplicated retention of records. In other words, enabling the preservation of business records by de-duplicating them from the source, whilst  classifying and aligning them seamlessly to retention policies. Records are consequently managed from a single source across all locations, media and public or private clouds from the cradle to grave.

Retention Lifecycle Management (RLM) is revolutionising and defining the way organisations quickly and efficiently adopt better Information Governance.  Organisations typically have many projects on the go that relate to information governance, but many of these projects are managed and delivered in isolation from each other even though they have common goals in mind.  Unifying the way you classify and retain information for the long term irrespective of storage media and how you adapt it, whilst providing seamless business access, changes all this.

Sheila Childs, Director of Storage Strategies and Technologies for Gartner, comments: “Retention Lifecycle Management is a compelling concept that could fulfill the promises made but not fully delivered by ILM because unifying software that brings together business records, regardless of the source, into a singular information foundation from the onset has been hard to find. Being able to leverage a common repository across all data types with added intelligence and automation facilitates the flexible retention of all records based on business needs and governance requirements.”

If Information Governance is as much about process as utilising technology, what does this mean for organisations?

It means organising (classifying) and retaining records on a more holistic basis for both current and legacy records independent of state (active/passive), location or copy. Governance is about the application of information access and retention principles across the enterprise in a consistent and risk adverse way.

How do you do it?

1. Make information accessible—unify the way you see and acquire information, align to flexible and staged retention schedules

2. Make information searchable—implement ways to search active and passive, current and legacy information records regardless of location or source

3. Organise information in layers—apply simple “back” classification methods to group and associate records by common search criteria or content patterns. Start with simple departmental groupings
building to more detailed record types and content owners

4. Realign information to specific retention policies—ensure categories of records are aligned to
more appropriate and specific record retention and disposition schedules

5. Move information records to appropriate repositories—whether you record for formal ISO, DOD, EU or other record keeping schedules, move records via automated workflow to dedicated repositories, ECM, RM, Hosted and offsite.

-Ends-

About CommVault
A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault's exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unprecedented control over data growth, costs and risk. CommVault's Simpana® software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative Data Protection, Archive, Replication, Search and Resource Management capabilities. More companies every day join those who have discovered the unparalleled efficiency, performance, reliability, and control only CommVault can offer. Information about CommVault is available at www.commvault.com . CommVault's corporate headquarters is located in Oceanport, New Jersey in the United States.

Media Contact
Colin Saldanha
Procre8
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Email: colin@procre8.biz