Information Lifecycle Management: To File Or Not To File

Businesses float in an ocean of information. Companies collect it from customers, suppliers, internal operations, and the world outside. Once gathered, it can be stored, examined, interpreted, recycled, repurposed, and regurgitated—used in ways undreamt of until a few years ago. Billions of times a day, the right data at the right place and time helps clinch an order, fill a pipeline, or guide an organization's destiny.

Today, technology puts information literally at your fingertips. But as we are beginning to see, the price of instant availability can be high. One man's invaluable piece of intelligence is another woman's disk clog. If all data is equal, then "Houston, we have a capacity problem." Anyway, it is clearly not only impractical but undesirable to have all the data available to everybody all the time. Who needs a five-year- old invoice? Well the IRS might—but we'll come to that. The need to manage data availability on the basis of "pertinence" or "relevance" has been around for a very long time. Libraries do it all the time. Try going to your local library and asking for Sir Walter Scott's translations of Goethe for instance. They can "get it" for you—but it's not going to be sitting alongside Harry Potter.

To meet these demands at the most general level, vast amounts of "lower grade" storage have evolved with high capacities and low price points. It's fine, but now there's the ever-present risk of relegating critical data to a level where it can be delayed or even lost. Death on the File. That too can be costly. The choice between the cost of protection and the cost of delay can be a difficult one, but it is, in essence, the same choice we make every time we purchase insurance. And like insurance, protection can be tailored to fit the value of what is being covered.