Managing data is a must have for large and small organizations. But if they can’t search that data the process is useless. When most IT professionals think of data management, they think of saving money. But that’s just the beginning. Certainly organizations understand the value of retaining data for regulatory reasons. However, they get the real value of managing data from retaining that data so it is available for future monetization opportunities.
In both cases, retention because you have to (regulation) and retention because you want to (monetization), the organization needs to be able to rapidly find the right information at the right time. But search is seldom a context level search of the data within a file. Modern search requires an intelligent use of the metadata that travels along with the file. The problem with context level search is that it creates an index that is too large to be useful and many files in the environment have no reason to be contextually indexed.
Instead, organizations need to organize data by its metadata. The problem is that most data management solutions have a very rudimentary means of classifying data. They typically only focus on the date last modified or the date last accessed. Then, based on that date they might move the data to an alternate type of storage.
The reality is that even basic file systems provide much more information about the file then just a couple of dates. An intelligent system can also build extra metadata information based on how the basic metadata changes. For example, knowing how frequently the modification dates or access dates are changing gives some intelligence as to where to store the data.
All of this captured information needs to be stored in a database that is easily and rapidly searched.
StorageSwiss Take
Being able to search and classify data based is a critical capability when undergoing a data management project. It enables the organization to build sophisticated policies or to conduct ad-hoc searches based on a specific discovery request.
To learn more about data management, watch our on-demand webinar, “3 Reasons You Are Losing the Data Management Battle and How To Start Winning.”
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Twelve years ago George Crump founded Storage Switzerland with one simple goal; to educate IT professionals about all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought after public speaker. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN, Virtualization, Cloud and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.
