Growing data volumes and increases in regulatory compliance are requiring enterprises to evaluate their data management strategies and implement scalable solutions that solve today’s challenges. Enterprise data management must also integrate into a company’s existing application infrastructure and provide the means to manage data growth while maintaining referential integrity of the application.

Organic Data Growth

E-Business applications have given organization the ability to capture, analyze and retain unparalleled amounts of data about its business, customers, and suppliers. But with these systems are capturing potentially millions of transactions on a daily basis. Over time, data growth is exponential and needs to be actively managed for long term success. By many accounts, stored data in databases is doubling every other year. In addition to the daily capture of information, mergers and acquisitions are putting pressure on IT organizations to support and manage new IT systems. For industries such as High Technology and Financial Services that tend to grow through mergers, acquisition data growth can far exceed the expected organic growth rate.

Downstream Data Growth

Database applications, unlike email and file servers, require multiple copies of production systems to support test and development efforts such as creating versions for patch, test, QA, training and possibly a stand-by copy for disaster recovery purposes. On average, for every production application, IT makes eight copies for production support. As the production database grows, so do all the copies, consuming large quantities of storage. When an application or database needs to be upgraded, additional copies are required to reduce risk associated with the upgrade process. Many times, the need for storage by the database administrators (DBAs) exceeds the allocated storage and storage consumption forecasts. CIOs and IT directors struggle to reduce costs of infrastructure while keeping mission-critical database applications online, operational and current. On average, IT data centers manage at least six mission-critical applications. Multiply the number of applications by the number of copies (6 apps x 8 copies = 42 total) to meet the storage requirement, plus the servers required to support each copy, and the power to support the entire infrastructure, it is no surprise that more than 70 percent of IT budgets are allocated to the database applications even though only 20 percent of the production data is database data. Analysts estimate that email and unstructured content represents approximately 80 percent of production data.

Data Retention Requirements

Corporate policies, Government and regulatory bodies are driving data retention. For example, Healthcare data retention requirements can range from 10 years for patient records to permanent data storage for births and deaths. Sarbanes-Oxley requires corporate financial data be retained for 5 years and under Basel II, Banks needs 7 years of risk data to meet their capital requirements. These regulations were developed to ensure a proper financial and operational record of the business but put a burden on all organizations to not only retain the data but maintain accessibility. Without enterprise data management strategies, organizations will not be able to meet the requirements placed on them, and not being able to produce records is no longer a defensible strategy in regulatory actions or litigation.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next