Why implementing a data lifecycle management strategy is key to secure and efficient IT operations
It’s said the only two certain things in life are death and taxes, but if you work in IT, another certainty is an abundance of data. In 2021, people created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Often housed across systems with disparate organizing principles, it is not uncommon for data to be disorganized and haphazardly managed. For many IT leaders, it can feel nearly impossible to institute a system that keeps an organization’s data organized, secure, and usable. This is why an effective data management and preservation system is essential.
Enter: Data lifecycle management (DLM). A well-established approach to data management from creation to preservation and destruction, DLM helps a company leverage data and protect its integrity while managing risk and maintaining compliance. Adopting a data lifecycle management (DLM) approach offers companies a host of benefits for organizing, maintaining, and preserving data within your organization.
3 Benefits of Data Lifecycle Management
DLM is an approach to managing data at each stage throughout its lifecycle. When adopting a DLM approach, a company establishes guidelines and principles around how to store, organize, maintain, preserve, and destroy data created or received within the organization. Having a comprehensive approach to data management provides a company with several important benefits.
Keep data organized for efficiency
When organized, data can be a major operational advantage. Consider for a moment data received or created each day within any police department located across the county. Each case, each traffic stop, each suspect interview produces data that may be important evidence. But having a system in place for storing and organizing this data is critical to ensure its accessibility and effectiveness for future use.
While your business may not be dealing with the type of life-or-death data scenarios as a police department, the lessons are the same. Having consistent principles to organize data so that it can be easily found, manipulated, and used is essential to business operations. Critical customer information, proprietary product code, or important operational intelligence, for example, are mission-critical and need to be both accessible and reliable. A DLM strategy develops policies and procedures to ensure all metadata is tagged consistently, creating an essential system to easily access data for future use.
Maintain data integrity and security
A primary goal of DLM is to keep your data secure. Having a defined approach to managing and preserving data at each stage of its lifecycle helps reduce vulnerabilities that could lead to security risks. It also helps ensure that only those with the necessary permissions have access to sensitive information within your system. This helps protect your company against possible internal bad actors accessing sensitive information that they shouldn’t.
Additionally, keeping only the most current, high-quality data stored within your system ensures that users aren’t inadvertently accessing outdated versions. Outdated, duplicate data creates inefficiencies throughout your organization that can lead to costly mistakes. A DLM approach provides a blueprint for how you manage data to maintain its integrity and maximize its usefulness, while keeping it secure.
As an added benefit, since a DLM approach enforces rules around data archival and deletion, your organization doesn’t hold onto data longer than is required. This helps reduce cloud, offline, and other data storage costs.
Protect against losses and liabilities
Each industry has its own set of rules and regulations for data retention. Additionally, state and regional regulations such as GDPR, SOX, and CCPA require organizations to take the proper precautions to handle and preserve data with care. The public is becoming increasingly savvy in wanting to understand how companies use and store their personal information. These regulations mean that companies can no longer ignore the proper maintenance and disposal of data. Doing so puts them at risk for legal ramifications and massive fines. A DLM strategy helps organizations handle data with increased security, streamlining the process to comply with data privacy laws.
Want to learn more about why a comprehensive data lifecycle management strategy is the key to efficient, effective, and secure IT management and get tips on how to get started creating a DLM approach? Read our Data Lifecycle Management FAQ.
