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Best Practices in Information Governance
Tangible, hard-dollar savings come from
Information Governance the improved performance and reduced costs
in production systems, which is achieved by in-
stituting retention management and information
It’s No Longer Merely “Nice to Have” lifecycle management (ILM).
ILM ensures that information, based on its
business value, goes to the appropriate tier of stor-
age with the appropriate services. This means
By Kelly Ferguson, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, EMC that production application environments are not
bloated with excessive content. The most valuable
In agame is lowering costs and doingthe name of
the
challenging economic climate,
more with
privacy mandates throughout the lifecycle of infor-
mation, whether physical or electronic.
information resides on the highest performing,
most expensive infrastructure, while aged content
less. In our personal lives, we postpone or forego Information governance is born of broader gov- migrates seamlessly to a more cost-effective
purchases that we do not deem absolutely neces- ernance, risk and compliance (GRC) initiatives that environment for long-term retention.
sary. In our business lives, we look for ways to companies are developing in order to apply enforce- Operational savings arise through reduced
do things more efficiently. We cut costs from day-
to-day operations and take steps to increase the able, repeatable, consistent and defensible policies. server and storage capacity requirements, lower
productivity and value of resources. To ensure that information is managed backup and recovery costs, as well as reductions
At the same time, the new era of “going green” according to policy and is delivering business value, in disaster-recovery expenses. System perform-
has us reducing waste, looking for innovative ways various constituents—including compliance offi- ance improvements and the ability to more
of reusing and recycling materials and making the cers, records managers, legal departments and IT— consistently meet service level agreements are
most of existing resources. must come together. more difficult to quantify, but offer operational
But how many of us can say that we apply this Of course, getting this group to agree upon an benefits nonetheless.
same philosophy to the way we manage elec- information management strategy can be challeng- Organizations also experience information
tronic information? ing. However, pressures posed by the growth of governance ROI from compliance and e-discov-
There is no question we are creating more elec- electronic information, 80% of it unstructured (per ery perspectives, which is where some of the more
tronic information than ever before. Analyst esti- IDC estimates), coupled with expanding regulatory intangible benefits come in to play.
mates suggest a 60% per-year volume increase in and e-discovery requirements, ultimately necessi- Consider the damage to your company’s rep-
the amount of electronic information generated tate a unified information management approach. utation or the potentially significant fines you
worldwide. The consistent complaint we hear from Effective information governance provides a stand to face for non-compliance with industry
customers and colleagues is that there is just too foundation for addressing