New information management techniques bundle significant storage revenues along with MFPs and software.

For years now, solution providers have been able to craft content-management upselling strategies around reliable regulatory pillars such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and
e-discovery rules. Because of these and other laws, end users must closely manage data to reduce the risk of breaches and potentially hefty government fines.

Now there’s a new twist on the information management category that not only promotes the wider use of electronic documents, but can also help solution providers reach beyond printing technology to boost their storage sales.

Information life-cycle management (ILM) is a set of technologies and best practices for managing information efficiently, while also reducing costs. Cost savings for customers come when they match data files with the right storage medium. To do this, ILM systems automatically move information according to its importance and age onto three tiers of storage drives or arrays. The idea is to keep the latest, most important and most often accessed data on the fastest — and in turn most expensive — drives. Older information that’s not called up as often moves to slower and more economical alternatives. Finally, data that’s rarely needed but must be stored for regulatory purposes resides on the slowest drives and tape systems that cost only a handful of dollars per gigabyte.

Sales Potential
What are the business opportunities for solution providers? They consist of a total package of networked printers and MFPs, plus workflow and document management software, as well as layers of high-margin SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives and arrays.

To handle ILM successfully, solution providers need to understand how information changes over time. For example, many customers would rank the latest sales orders and customer e-mails highest in importance and thus store them on the fastest and most technologically sophisticated hard drives. This critical information stays safe and, when necessary, businesspeople can access it with millisecond response times.

As the information ages and new orders and e-mails take precedence, the customer’s
pre-set migration policies guide the ILM system to automatically move the older data to the second tier of less expensive hard drives and storage arrays, which bundle multiple drives within a single unit.

To sell these types of systems, solution providers should promote some potentially impressive cost savings. For example, the price differential between a high-speed hard drive at about $72 per gigabyte and a respectable $14 per gigabyte second-tier drive is more than 80 percent. Move data down to a tier-three, $4 per gigabyte unit and the reductions hit 94 percent.

Additional upselling opportunities may appear, depending on individual customers. For example, network performance may need expansion, and technology for data encryption and digital signatures are must-haves for some companies.

Once the technology is in place, solution providers should look to providing professional services to help clients work through the policy decisions associated with ILM. This includes three important steps that begin with analyzing a customer’s data to understand how it’s created, how quickly it grows and how its importance changes over time. Next, create data classifications that will determine how the ILM system manages the flow of information. Finally, develop data access and migration policies so end users can regulate who can access individual records and whether they can update or edit the information.