A sustainable storage strategy requires balancing the cost of storing and managing information with its changing value over time. StorageTek calls this concept information lifecycle management (ILM). ILM provides a practical methodology for aligning storage costs with business priorities.

Applying an information lifecycle management approach can help you reduce storage costs, manage information growth and enhance data protection.

Applying information lifecycle management
ILM step	How StorageTek can help	Results
Assess information and storage assets	Storage optimization services Business continuity and recovery services	Information usage audit Data classification Capacity utilization audit Backup/restore assessment SAN optimization
Align data needs with storage options	Primary storage solutions	Optimize storage capacity by matching data performance needs with storage options
	Data protection solutions	Optimize data protection by matching data value with protection options
	Archive solutions	Improve data retention and recall with compliant archive and retrieval options
	Information management solutions	Automate management tasks to reduce cost and complexity
Maintain the data-to-storage balance	Storage management	Predictive storage and process management Multi-vendor storage monitoring and management
	Multi-vendor support services	Consolidated support services Simplified vendor management
	Data center operations Data migration services	Data migration Data center relocation Change management