What Is Information Life Cycle Management (ILM)?

Information is the lifeblood of your business. It's what you're selling and makes your company tick—so you must manage that information correctly. The Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) approach is a subset of the Data Life Management Cycle (DLM), which determines how data is moved, deleted, destroyed or archived. The strategic ILM approach is used to determine how information is transferred, deleted, destroyed or archived, and it's based on automated storage procedures, manual data organization formats and early data storage management like hierarchical storage management. ILM helps businesses maximize their information assets by ensuring they are managed according to business needs and requirements. It can include formal policies, informal procedures, and technical processes used to store and maintain information assets throughout their life cycle. ILM is a fancy way of saying "information life cycle management. " It's a tool used to keep track of your information. ILM helps you manage data throughout its entire lifespan—when it's created, how it's used, where it goes, who has access to it, what happens when you're done with it and so on. It is helpful in modern computing because data management is critical due to compliance issues from legislation like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Both are used to regulate particular types of data management. Do you know the data life cycle management (ILM) process? ILM products automate data management by organizing data and migration into tiers categorized by policy criteria. These policies can be based on file type, age or access frequency, or they can be found on more complex measures such as whether a document is marked as "sensitive" or "highly sensitive. " With ILM, you can automatically move files to new locations based on their content or even delete them if they are too old. In addition, ILM allows users to easily search through all information at once, regardless of where it's stored. Users can quickly and easily find any information without worrying about where it's stored or how to access it.