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What
is the proper concern of the IT department of a modern
enterprise — backing data up or making sure that
data is available? The answer to that is obvious —
the primary information management concern in the enterprise
today is to ensure that the knowledge necessary to drive
critical business processes is available where it needs
to be, when it needs to be.
The
costs of failure to do this are high. A study of 80
large organisations by Infonetics Research found that
overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of
annual revenue. And research by Creative Networks, Inc.
has shown that Microsoft Exchange downtime can also
easily cost thousands of dollars per hour in a mid-sized
organisation.
On
another end of the spectrum are the potential costs
of legal exposure arising from losses of data covered
by legislation like HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley. Speed is
less an issue here, but the cost of losing the information
entirely could be devastating.
Business
in the real world requires that information be accessible
in real time. But what does real time really mean?
Real-time
is usually associated with speed – a real-time
system must be able to process information quickly and
as events actually occur in order to respond in a timely
way. Real-time doesn’t actually mean fast, it means
fast enough. What is fast enough for real-time response
to one event, say a pilot’s routine request for
the status of some subsystem is woefully inadequate
for another, for example the need to take evasive action
to avoid collision with another plane. In other words,
real-time information management is about just what
we said above: getting information where it needs to
be when it needs to be, whether that is microseconds,
minutes or days.
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