Active Information Management

Active Information Management

AIMstor is a single application built to deliver Active Information Management of storage.

If you want to achieve any level of consistent Active Information Management, it is impossible to do so with legacy point solutions on the market today.

Only AIMstor can provide this capability, because of its unique technology:

• AIMstor uses Change Detection technology, in real time.
• AIMstor connects Data-Flow to Policies and Classifications.
• AIMstor makes data Searchable.

Because we set out to create a solution for AIM, we ended up with something that unifies many different solutions.

• Change Detection allows us to provide many Information Security capabilities.
• Matching Data Flow to Policies and Classifications requires a Unified Repository, which in turn allows us to consolidate many Data Protection, Storage Management and Data Reduction solutions into a single application.
• Making data Searchable means that we had to build AIMstor with Next Generation Search Engine technology. This in turn allows us to provide many Compliance and eDiscovery capabilities.

While AIMstor does in fact, unify many various solutions into a single application, it is specifically toward a single goal; Active Information Management. Actively managing your Information, from creation to archive.

Active Policy Management

It is critical for the effective management of data, to implement solutions that provide true end-to-end management. This can only be accomplished with policies that actively manage the data.

Deploying a consistent policy scheme to manage data from "creation to end of life" - is the elusive goal of many IT managers. The problem is that multiple point products offer many different types of policy management, and apply their brand of metadata to the mix. Only by unifying a broad spectrum of data management tools, and managing them "actively", can one cross the chasm, and achieve consistent metadata, policy consistency, and long term policy and data flow uniformity.

At Cofio, we do this with Active Information Management (AIM), the platform that AIMstor is built upon.

Below is a simplified example of a typical legacy policy stack. Point products have competing metadata, which cannot be unified with other point products, even if they come from the same vendor.

AIMstor cures the hardships that plague policy management of data across the enterprise spectrum. Within AIMstor, a policy can be briefly defined as a combination of two things:

• What you want to do, and
• What you want to do it to

These we term as the operation and the classification.

For Instance, a statement such as: 'I want all the executive documents to be versioned and archived for 5 years from the point that they are created' will neatly translate to policies 'Retain 5 years, keep versions, classification documents, applied to all users in the Exec group'.

Policies can be defined in as little as a few minutes, and once defined, they are compiled to a lower level instruction set suitable for the underlying data management layers, and propagated throughout each component that will manage that policy.

The 'active' elements of policy management within AIMstor can be tuned and reassigned real-time, and on-the-fly.

Policies

AIMstor is designed to allow the administrator to implement a Business Process through the use of policies. Policies are then mapped to machines / groups and to the data management agents that implement those policies.

Uniquely, a large and complex environment can be configured in a matter of minutes rather than days through the use of only two screens.

The policy definition screen enables the administrator to design the business objective. The dataflow screen then defines where those policies and the way data is flows through reflecting the information life cycle.

Once this is completed, the administrator need only apply that new topology. The software will compile those policies into more granular instructions and send those instructions to each of the elements involved in data management activity.

Auto-Classification

AIMstor classifies data in real time, based upon policies assigned to any set of data (structured, unstructured, document type, file type, owner, etc.)

Because of the ability to combine various Classifications into a single policy, AIMstor allows Classifications that are both broad and sweeping, and others that are incredibly granular, limited only by your imagination.

Tagging Excel files from the CFO, from a particular file server folder, can be done in seconds. Such a policy could be applied for the life of such data, starting the moment such data is created.

The result is a Policy Management capability that takes seconds to configure, Classifications that are automatically attached to data upon creation, and a ability to manage at any level required by the IT administration team, or the CIO.