ILM as a journey
Moving Towards Storage as a Service.
Current technology decision making in larger organisations is more dependent on making existing IT platforms as efficient as possible to support business demands, and less on the 'next big thing'. However, particularly in storage and information management, there remain weaknesses in the day to day operation of such environments. This report positions Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) in the context of infrastructure management as a whole, to yield understanding of where we are today, and how much further there is to go. The research shows that businesses are being more prudent than ever with their IT spending, focusing on delivering an efficient infrastructure and reaping the benefits that this can bring for the business.
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Author/s:
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Bob Tarzey |
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Created:
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01/11/2005
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Filename:
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ILM_as_a_journey_November_2005.pdf
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Report Commissioned by:
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Tags:
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document management |
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- This report establishes an index to enable the comparison of different countries and sectors in their progress towards ILM
To reach the goals of comprehensive ILM, companies need to be motivated to do so, technically prepared to do so and operationally organised to do so. Whether or not companies would consider themselves to be 'doing ILM', steady progress has been made towards all three points, resulting in an overall index marker of 5.2 out of a maximum of 10. The Republic of Ireland fares better than the United Kingdom, with a score of 6.2 over the UK's 5.1; also the healthcare and utilities sectors, at 5.8, are in advance of the others, particularly the public sector which comes in at only 4.3 on the scale.
- The business need for efficiency and effectiveness is driving IT projects
While competitive pressures and market dynamics are the main causes of change for over half of all businesses, they are not looking to change their working practices. With customer requirements changing little, organisations are focusing on how they can improve the provision of services. Organisations are aligning IT strategy in general, and information management strategy in particular, to support their business activities as efficiently as possible, and there is a high level of confidence that such alignments can deliver what is required.
- We are in the middle of a rationalisation wave of technology spending
With this emphasis on IT efficiency, over half of the organisations surveyed are looking to reduce their number of data centres. The vast majority of companies - over 85% - are planning to rationalise and consolidate their server and storage environments, and a significant proportion of these have work in progress or have already done so. Also, the majority of companies see server and storage virtualisation as being useful, if not essential to making best use of such consolidated environments.
- The biggest issues in IT today concern how to access, collate and protect information
Given that data management understanding is considered as comprehensive by only one third of businesses, it is reasonable that the challenges of finding the right information, and collating it for reviews and compliance requirements, are seen by nearly half as the two biggest issues of today's IT environments. Equally significant is the need to protect information against unauthorised access or modification.
- Operational processes for backup and recovery are not being followed comprehensively
A third of respondents stated that their organisations do not adhere to their backup practices as well as they should, with 8% stating they had no standard procedures in place at all: this is a little worrying, given that the survey was of large and enterprise-scale organisations. Even more worrying was the fact that 30% of backups are being stored in the same building as the data centre. There are, however, signs of progress - the majority of companies say they have some kind of improvement initiative in place.
