How can companies better address the problem?
By focusing on the different reasons we need to manage
information, and then choosing the technology accordingly,
instead of starting with the technology and trying to force it
to handle all of our information management needs.
To return to our backup and archive example, you may
have three separate needs: ( 1) to know what your data is
and how much of it you have, ( 2) to manage your active
data, and ( 3) to store content in a way that lets you access
it as needed in a discovery or compliance context. It is difficult to do all of them with a solution that’s only designed
to do one. and buying individual solutions from different
vendors and trying to cobble them together can also be
problematic. Choose solutions that are designed to work
together. That allows you to start with the capabilities
that address your current problem, and then add additional
capabilities as the need arises.
How should companies decide which solutions to buy?
Certain data management challenges go hand in hand.
The need to back up and recover live data and the need
to archive inactive data is a typical example. Ideally, a
vendor will have the experience to know which problems
frequently occur together, and the foresight to package
its various capabilities in bundles designed specifically to
address those common issues as a group.
How is this different from buying products or services
separately?
Packaged solutions work together with minimal need for
your IT team to not only make it easier to buy what you
need to solve related problems, but also they aid to varying
degrees in deployment while minimizing IT’s integration,
tuning or tailoring burdens. A vendor-partner will understand your company’s specific problems in order to prescribe a specific package of solutions to address them.
With backup and recovery, for example, the top priority
is the ability to retrieve the most recent files and get them
up and running as quickly as possible. In a disaster, you
typically don’t need last year’s files as a first priority, so
why back up those files the same way? A better option is
to add an archive component to manage your static content instead.
Can companies still choose standalone solutions?
Absolutely, but you should still think about the big picture in making your selection. If you have chosen the right
vendor, you can start with a single product or service to
address a specific pain point. Just make sure that you can
add other appropriate solutions as your needs grow.
The idea is simply to create greater value through efficiency. The technical details are handled so you can focus
on solving more than one related problem at a time.
The backup and recovery situation I just mentioned is a
good example. If your top priority is fixing a data recovery
exposure, you can start with a solution like Iron Moun-
tain’s LiveVault®, and add a file archive component (like
Iron Mountain’s Virtual File Store™ service) down the road.
Solutions like these work quite well on their own, though
there is incredible benefit to combining them when you are
ready to take the next step.
Choose backup and archive
solutions that are designed
to work together. That allows
you to start with the capabilities that address your
current problem, and then
add additional capabilities
as the need arises.
What’s the philosophy behind this approach?
It’s critical to understand how to move from the theoretical
to the practical — how to create records management rules
that make sense both from a policy standpoint and on a
practical level, and how to create procedures that back them
up. In an era in which so much depends on data integrity,
information management requires a high level of consistency
and completeness, with the capability to span the spectrum
from physical to digital information — to a hybrid of the two
and even moving from one to the other.
Iron Mountain’s expertise lies in helping customers
create and enact policies that make sense in their organization, not just in theory. We help our customers take
care of their information day in and day out, treating their
information as if it was our own. That affects what kind of
advice we give, how we react to the unforeseen in the customer environment, and how we step in to help. At its core,
we are there to provide real-world solutions to the very real
information management needs of our customers. ▲
JIM CUFF is the vice president of strategy for Iron
Mountain Digital
