Structured Data Manager

A better way to manage data

It's no surprise that nearly every business today faces exponential data growth, with huge volumes of information in diverse formats spread across numerous repositories. The abundance and diversity of this information creates a number of difficult challenges related to budgets, security, and application performance.

Industry and government regulations continue to escalate, requiring diligent compliance practices and the introduction of defensible deletion across all electronically stored information. As most companies are doubling their data volume every 12-18 months, the pressure is on.

Avoid the dreaded data bloat

Compounding the challenge of information overload, many organizations struggle with multiple bloated application databases that contain inactive structured data that has built up over many years.

Conventional thinking has been that this data can only be accessed via the application that created it, so the data is typically never moved or deleted. As a result, your organization can experience degraded business application performance, additional storage cost, and never-ending labor costs associated with keeping these applications running within the required service levels.

This data is typically not governed by defensible disposal policies, which means it can create an unnecessary liability to the business.

Gaining control of application data remains one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for organizations of all sizes. Failure to proactively manage this information bloat leads to unnecessarily high data storage costs, increased compliance risk, and untapped potential in leveraging the data for improved business performance.

Some key benefits of the SDM approach include:

The growing problem of structured data

Many companies simply don't know how their structured data problem started. When organizations first deploy their production database, the data footprint is compact, the maintenance cost is manageable, application performance is good, and downtime and compliance risks are relatively low.

But as time moves on and the daily transactional volumes increase, the production database expands in size. Nothing is removed from the system as either business owners won't allow it or the application does not provide the capability to delete. Over time, this can result in performance degradation for application end users, so organizations will usually end up performance tuning and finally resort to purchasing additional, faster hardware to maintain application services levels, driving up the operational expense and the total cost of ownership of that application.

These problems are not just limited to end user performance, but also impact the daily backup cycle, batch processing, general database housekeeping, upgrade, and associated non-production activities such as time-to-clone and testing. The risk to the business also increases, as data is not being managed according to corporate policy and compliance requirements. But you can solve these data management problems through proactive application archiving driven by your business rules.

This changes the problem of managing structured data into an opportunity to reduce costs and improve efficiency. An effective data management policy needs to address these four basic questions:

1. What data is your organization keeping and why?
2. Where is it stored?
3. Can you access and use the data?
4. Can you hold, retain, and delete the data defensibly?

Implementing this analysis into a structured data management policy can enable you to proactively control data growth in the future and limit the need for additional storage capacity and resources.