Informatica Perspectives

The main goals of any Application ILM project are to reduce cost, improve application performance while maintaining compliance.  To meet these goals, data has to be moved from a production database to either an online, accessible archive or purged completely from the system.  In either case, data is deleted from production.  Deleting data can have a significant impact on the production system’s performance if not executed carefully.  However, once the data is gone – the benefits have a ripple effect.  Production tables are smaller and more manageable.  Recovery times and maintenance windows can be reduced.  The cost of managing a smaller production database is reduced proportionally with the amount of data removed. 

[Read more]

The cover story on the March 8th issue of Computerworld is “Swinging Toward Centralization”. It talks about the pendulum moving toward IT consolidation as organizations strive to save money and improve controls. This article is not alone. A growing number of analysts are talking about consolidation, Lean IT practices, and taking “a production line approach to integration”.  When you combine all this rhetoric with the industry fundamentals, the stage is set for 2010 to The Year of the ICC. [Read more]

While the market is showing signs of recovery from the "Great Recession" most state budgets have been feeling the squeeze from the lag in recovery. In a recent article titled The Sorry State of Finances, Liam Denning explained that, "55% of state revenue, before federal transfers, comes from personal and corporate income tax." Denning also stated that, "the first three quarters of 2009 were the worst for state tax since at least 1963."

There is an apparent lag between recovery in the private sector and a state receiving tax revenue. So what can states do about this problem while they suffer in the red? Mr. Denning said, "Since states can't run general funding deficits, closing gaps mean raising taxes, cutting services and resorting to one-time measures." Mr. Denning's list of solutions is certainly accurate, but does it include all options that states have? What about employing new technology to discover fraud or recover uncollected revenue? [Read more]

Over the last few blogs, we have stepped through a project to implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) on corporate databases.  First, we evaluated the target databases, then we determined the Business Objects and assigned retention periods to the data – including both Legal and Operational requirements.  Now that we are ready to start applying the retention policies and deleting data, it is a good idea to set up an archive database as an intermediate repository for business objects classified as legal records.
[Read more]

Today Informatica announced that Bay & Bay Transportation has used Informatica Cloud Services to achieve a six month project payback on their total Salesforce.com investment and a 900 percent return on their critical data integration project.

Bay & Bay is using the turnkey, on-demand Informatica Cloud Services to provide robust, bi-directional synchronization between its logistics management databases and applications with Salesforce CRM. Using an intuitive web based integration wizard, the company automatically maps source and target fields, configures powerful data transformations, and sets automated synchronization schedules. And being a true multi-tenant cloud-based service, there is no hardware, software, or infrastructure for them to install, manage, or maintain.

[Read more]

This is the last of the Data as an Asset series and what better way to wrap up the theme than with a view to the future. As stated by Thomas Redman, author of Data Driven, “Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally.” The future vision then is around Agile Data-Driven Enterprises. [Read more]

Two of the more common questions that arise when trying to effectively deploy Data Governance are; "Where do I begin?" and "What business areas should I include?".  If you start too narrowly, the value and credibility of the effort is questioned.   Be too aggressive, and delivery risk and scalability become a problem.  As usual, success comes down to defining and managing scope.   However, more times than not it is prudent to err on the small side, and here's why… [Read more]

A key benefit of implementing an Application Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project is to reduce the amount of structured data in the data center.  Application ILM is a combination of a strategy and process that assesses information based on its business value and aligns the technology it resides on.  This process assures that the data center does not over allocate IT resources if the business doesn’t need it.  And likewise, if the business can provide detailed requirements for what it needs for its data, the IT department has a better idea of its technology forecasting needs.  Application ILM is a capacity planner’s friend.

[Read more]

The only way for HealthDetail to hold or increase margins was to think differently. The company’s provider directory business supplies accurate and compliant healthcare directories for Medicaid and other health insurers. The problem was that the volume of data coming in and the breadth of different sources it was derived from threatened to overwhelm the existing database. HealthDetail could either invest in dedicated database administration resources, at great expense, or consider a more innovative solution: cloud-based data integration.

[Read more]

One aspect of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project that often gets overlooked is deleting data. Once information has reached the end of its usefulness, delete it. It is the single-most cost effective task you can execute on an ILM project. If you don’t have the data, you don’t have to store it, manage it, or worry about it getting into the wrong hands. Delete it.

[Read more]