IT organizations are becoming more and more aware of the need for information governance but if their concerns only result in collaborative planning efforts there is no mechanism to actually put the plans into execution. However, there are solutions designed to help overcome this hurdle. The information management side of CommVault's Simpana 9 turns the planning exercise into actions that can achieve measurable results in such areas as eDiscovery and compliance.
We'll get to what that really means, but first we'll consider CommVault. With roughly $271 million in revenues in fiscal year 2010 ending March 31 and consistent growth even during the financial trauma of recent years, the company can be safely characterized as a very successful software vendor.
CommVault's signature product is Simpana software and the newly introduced version of the product, Simpana 9, is characterized as a data and information management solution. That division of features is a critical point, as the two faces of Simpana are very important.
Data management and information management are two distinct and differing capabilities. Data management covers the non-data-path control and use of data from creation to deletion, including replication and backup/restore processes. Information management handles business content and the decision-making relationships of information as it moves through the lifecycle of business processes. Although Simpana 9 obviously has a strong data management side as this was the original face of CommVault's software and therefore has always served as a strong foundation, our focus today will be on the information management side and its relevance to governance. The bailiwick of information governance includes the people, processes, and technologies necessary to ensure the preservation, availability, confidentiality, and usability of an enterprise's information resources.
To greatly simplify a complex situation, governance requires enterprises to understand what data they have at a low level of granularity. But it is not only simply being able to find and review that information but also to effectively manage it. Management covers a wide variety of issues, but managing retention policies, ensuring that the information is authentic, and preserving the privacy of sensitive information are among them. As might be expected, Simpana 9 has a robust framework that covers all the necessary and typical governance capabilities (in a general sense) that a company might require.
