Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
Driven by significant change in storage technologies and business requirements, we are starting to see the kind of organizational tension in storage functions that heretofore has been identified mainly with applications development, network development, server, and security groups in IT organizations.
Until now, storage administrators were protected from this pressure mainly because they encountered business change in the form of demands for new storage at better price points with different performance levels. However, with the introduction of storage services enabled by new technologies such as virtualization, data deduplication and thin provisioning, combined with heightened business requirements for assured access to business records to support compliance, disaster recovery, and other demands that directly impact how storage is managed, storage administration is facing significant change.
Exactly how this combination of traditional and new storage activities will be organized is unclear. But whatever organizational form emerges must accommodate some new realities inside the management of information. This new function in the organization – which might be termed “records management” since it involves organizing information as complete business records, although this should not be confused with the often microfiche-based records management of the past – will have several responsibilities. The first of those will be the introduction of policy that fundamentally shifts the focus of storage management from the acquisition and implementation of storage assets for capturing new data to issues surrounding retrieving and reusing coherent business records, often made up of multiple components from different sources. An example might be a business transaction with all associated e-mails, memos, background information and other relevant records.
This new emphasis on the access of business information with all its metadata intact – and in a form that can be reused by new software after the original applications that created the data are replaced – for compliance, business recovery and other reasons, rather than just the bytes showing business transactions, has been growing for 10-15 years.
The new responsibilities of records management focus on three types of policy:
- Transitioning the view of data from bits on a platter to business records. This includes better storage-level metadata management and classification activities.
- Designing and implementing business systems for business continuance – disaster recovery and other considerations to ensure organizations can access the state of the business in the event of continuity-threatening contingencies.
- Defining when and what data is deleted and what is maintained.
These groups of policies will form the core of the record manager's tool-kit. They will also become the touchstone for identifying information assets and liabilities as information artifacts rather than just application, data, and device attributes.
Over the next few years different enterprises — driven by such issues as size, degree of information-intensity in the business, and regulatory environments — will pursue different paths to achieve this record-management capability inside their organizations. We will see different alignments within IT — for example between database and storage administration – to better accommodate the realities of overall information management at a schema level. While this will move at varying speeds and may take different forms in organizations, in the next five years we will see the evolution of formation of new procedures for records management in business.
Action Item: Storage administrators must recognize that many of their traditional practices will be automated by improved tools for configuration and allocation. However, this does not herald an end to the requirement for smart storage management. Rather it creates the possibility that professionals focused on storage can start aggressively learning new skills and performing new practices in response to the increasing business need for true records management.
Footnotes: