ABSTRACT
Developing data protection policies in isolation and disconnected from any planning around data lifecycle is a serious error for any business to make. For example, a common criticism of backup and recovery in general is it’s a “budget black hole”—that is, money is sunk into it without any return. Data lifecycle management is something that should be absolutely fundamental to the IT organization within any business, yet remains randomly or haphazardly implemented in most. Further, data classification as part of a backup process doesn’t deal with assigning data lifecycles to the original (primary storage) copy of the data. Ironically, ongoing advances in primary storage systems may be a blessing for businesses in terms of achieving high performance, normalized storage with seamless snapshot and instant copy functionality, but the flip-side is that they continue to masquerade the need for data lifecycle processes.
