What is information lifecycle management? Why Its Needed?

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What is information lifecycle management (ILM)?

Information lifecycle management (ILM) is a thorough method for managing all aspects of an organization's data, from its production and acquisition to its eventual obsolescence and deletion. In addition to lowering storage and data management expenses, a good ILM approach can also lessen the security, regulatory, and legal concerns associated with not maintaining complete control over business data.

ILM works with all aspects of data throughout its life course rather than concentrating on just one component of data management, in contrast to past approaches to data storage management. For instance, hierarchical storage management is not concerned with how data is converted or used, but rather with automating storage procedures. ILM covers a variety of challenges, including how data is used. ILM also provides more complex storage management criteria as compared to systems that merely use simple indicators, like data age or access frequency.

Best Archiving Software - IT Legacy Systems

Why Information Lifecycle Management Needed?

ILM entails managing information across the course of its existence to guarantee that important data is always accessible, while also reducing expenses and dealing with data compliance. That might seem a lot like archiving, and data archiving is really one of the "pillars" of SAP's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), also known as the SAP Netweaver® Information Lifecycle Management component. ILM offers much more than just archiving, as I shall go into more depth about below. It has a number of extra features that make it simpler to specify retention periods, automatically delete data at end of life, and rapidly find and manage all data pertaining to particular legal issues.

These skills are particularly beneficial to businesses working in tightly regulated sectors where it is necessary to show legal compliance in order to avoid paying fines. According to SAP, "the cost of compliance can be significant but the cost of non-compliance is even more costly," as prominent court cases over the past ten years have clearly shown. By automating a company's retention strategy, ILM lowers the risk of non-compliance and ensures that nothing is left to chance. Automation also reduces the difficulty, time, and expense of achieving compliance.

Increasing your level of data control

Let's explore some concrete ways that ILM can assist you in achieving compliance. Utilizing SAP Netweaver Information Lifecycle Management for SAP data and document archiving offers additional capability that gives you more control than the traditional method of doing so. This includes enabling you to put in place rules that automatically control how particular data is saved and handled at various points in its existence. It implies that you can choose data retention periods and have the data automatically deleted when its useful life is through.

When data reaches a specific age, when it is expected to be accessed less frequently, you can design business rules that automatically place the data into an archive on cheaper storage and delete it from the archive when it is no longer needed. Additionally, you might specify that specific data be automatically archived and stored on WORM (write once, read many) storage medium because it needs to be kept in a "tamper proof" format for compliance reasons.

ILM is crucial to compliance since it makes sure you abide by rules that outline how long you can keep specific information (such customer data) before it must be destroyed lawfully.

It's critical to understand the distinction between "deletion" and "destruction" in this situation. It is not sufficient to merely remove a data record from the live system when it exceeds its expiration date in order to be compliant. Additionally, all references to that data across the SAP system must be removed in order to completely erase all traces of it. Destroying all data for a particular client, for instance, would entail erasing all records from the live SAP database as well as all records and indexes in the archive, any connected documents, etc. You may attain this degree of control thanks to ILM.

Legal Case Management

Legal Case Management is another ILM capability that SAP has offered. There are two key components to this. First off, by ringfencing the records and barring any modifications while the legal action is pending, a legal hold facility enables companies to preserve documents connected to an active legal matter. Second, automated e-discovery streamlines the process of finding and gathering the information and records needed for a given legal case. Both of these features give businesses the ability to lower the expense and difficulty of locating and keeping electronic evidence.

Resources from old SAP installations can be released

The SAP Netweaver Information Lifecycle Management software contains capability to assist in decommissioning or consolidating legacy SAP systems, which can help enterprises save money. You can move a snapshot of the legacy data to the ILM retention warehouse, which is governed by the regulations set in SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management, if you are running various legacy systems or want to consolidate different SAP installations. By turning down the legacy systems, you can still use the data for reporting from your current SAP applications while freeing up resources.

Therefore, SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management offers very tangible advantages for enterprises that require further control over their data and wish to address specific issues like compliance or the decommissioning of various systems. Additionally, if you are already archiving and want the extra advantages, you can switch over to ILM without any problems.