BANGALORE, INDIA: Infrastructure management and information management, though they seem to be more or less the same, learning how to distinguish between them and more importantly learning the art of the latter will be the need of the hour.

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“Data will increase by 400 per cent during the next four years. Adding more tapes, back-up servers, or disks is not going to address this growing issue. In turn, it will only add up to the infrastructure management cost. Whereas, today storage industry has to move from infrastructure management to information management and learn how to manage information efficiently at lower cost,” said Vijay Mhaskar, VP, Information Management Group, Symantec India.

He was speaking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL in an interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: How can companies manage information efficiently?
Vijay: Backing-up, deduplication and archiving are a few different modes of managing data efficiently. However, before that companies should know how to distinguish between data that need to be restored for a short period, retained for a long period or deleted.

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Arbitrary deletion of data is not supported. What we require is a policy driven deletion. So, data which have to be restored for 30-60 days has to be moved to back-up and those which need to be retained for up to six months or more need to be moved to archive and those beyond that need to be deleted.

Companies have a tendency to store data because of legal issues, or the fear of deleting relevant data from old disks or tapes. It is not so often that they use the delete button. However, this is more so because there was no visibility into the data all these while.

Whereas, today we have technologies such as deduplication which can show that all data have been duplicated and can be deleted.

Unwanted data is a liability. So, companies should start defining the lifecycle of data. They should store only what is relevant and also start categorising them and back-up or archive accordingly.

With the new mandate that telcos need to archive data for at least six months, we will further see demand for archiving technologies in India.