In an increasingly global business world characterized by real-time, always-on communications and a dramatic upswing in human mobility, companies are being asked to respond almost instantly to their customers, competitors, and the market at large - and to do so based on real-time, accurate data.

Plus, it’s no longer enough for data-center managers to deliver data to end users - they must also protect the data from threats outside and in, ensure its accuracy, guarantee its availability in the event of myriad types of failure, and manage it over the course of a clearly defined lifecycle.

All these challenges combined form the overarching challenge that Nemertes refers to as “information stewardship,” which essentially refers to the ability to manage data in the face of these requirements and constraints.

In our ongoing research into information stewardship, Nemertes is finding very few companies that have a truly integrated, end-to-end information stewardship program (though some have made significant advances in specific areas).

Information stewardship comprises five key disciplines, each having to do with an aspect of effective information management:

* Information protection is concerned with ensuring that data is kept adequately private and secure.

* Data-quality management (DQM) ensures that data is accurate and complete (and that redundant or unnecessary duplicates are eliminated).

* Information-lifecycle management (ILM) maps the storage infrastructure to the data type, according to the ongoing business value of the information at hand and the compliance policies that govern it.

* Business-continuity planning/disaster recovery (BCP/DR) ensures that data is appropriately available in the event of a failure.

* And, of course, compliance in this context refers to the ability to ensure that data is managed, archived and logged in such a way as to enable compliance with various regulations.

Data center managers are ideally situated to lead some of these disciplines (typically BCP/DR and ILM) and assist with others (compliance, DQM, and information protection). Moreover, data center managers are well positioned to lead one of the most critical initiatives that affects all these disciplines: data classification. Classifying data in terms of its requirements for security, backup, storage, compliance, and accuracy is critical, as is creating an overarching framework for tracking this type of metadata.