ILM is a set of rules that rule the datas lifecycle. From a business standpoint, data has different faces: creation, reception, distribution, use, maintenance and provision. Provision is the information management practice less frequently used. Although a small proportion of organizational information never loses its value, most information loses its value over time. The value of almost all information is high shortly after being created, and in most cases this time varies between 1 to 3 years, after which its value declines rapidly. The registers then perform the transit through their life cycle to semi-active and finally inactive states.
ILM projects accompany the informations transit throught it´s lifecycle, by either moving the storaged data to lower range storage, historical databases, backups or deletion.
The techniques used in ILM projects are:
In most cases, the obsolescence criteria coincide with the time elapsed since the data was created. However, there are more complex cases where this simple rule is not enough, such as: