Informatica ILM – Overview

Informatica ILM : A firm which has acquired 100TB of data from its various landscapes in its production environment. The firm is using a Full Copy (Clones) to all its non-production environments like, development, QA, Testing, Training, Pre-production and a couple of sand boxes for NFR (non functional requirements reason).
With the time period, the production data grows and hence the clones size pertaining to other environments. This is termed as ‘Data Multiplier Effect’ and as the growth is exponential which stresses on the firm’s storage cost, dependency of various projects for concurrent data, online data, archived data and hence the overall firm’s budget.
Without ILM

 
With ILM

 
Robust, Cost-Effective Application Information Lifecycle Management:
Data volume is exploding and that also exponentially. The amount of data housed in the warehouse and application is growing by more than 65 percent each year. Keeping the ever increasing level of from adversely impacting system performance often means continually buying additional storage to accommodate this ongoing growth. As data storage grows, so does the cost of maintaining database license fees and conducting exhaustive proactive system maintenance.
The Informatica Application information lifecycle management (ILM) product family is designed to help the IT organization manage every phase of the data lifecycle, from development and testing to archiving and retirement.
Designed to work with any application or data warehouse hosted on an array of operating system platforms and using various databases, Informatica’s application ILM product family manages data throughout its lifecycle and reduces total cost of ownership while increasing return on investment for enterprise business applications.
 

 
As the IT organization faces the challenges of exploding data volumes, it must address these urgent needs:
-Improving application performance
-Reducing the risk of data breaches and improving test data quality
-Reducing the total cost of storage ownership
-Supporting corporate divestitures or reorganizations
-Supporting the regulatory compliances and data governance programs
-Optimizing development, testing and training environments
-Retiring legacy applications safely
The Informatica Application ILM family of products provides a complete solution that addresses the entire lifecycle of data to:

• Manage data growth – The application ILM product family helps the IT team archive inactive data simply and safely, reducing the burden on critical business systems and ensuring the IT organization’s ability to meet service level agreements. At the same time, it reduces the company’s overall storage footprint. As a result, the company can more readily contain the costs of hardware, databases, and packaged applications, as well as administration and maintenance.
• Optimize test data management – Developing, deploying, updating, and managing enterprise business applications means testing them repeatedly using multiple, representative, real-world test data sets-typically as a complete copy of the production database. Making multiple full copies of large production databases consumes valuable database and storage capacity. With the application ILM product family, the IT organization can optimize the test data management environment to control runaway data management costs by creating fully functional ‘lean’ copies that are as much as 75 percent smaller than the full production database.
• Support regulatory compliance – Depending on the company’s location, industry and type of data, the company maybe required by law to retain business critical data for a decade or more. The application ILM product family allows to retain data for a longer period in more cost effective storage. At the same time the software ensures that that the IT organization can access that archived data on demand, so that the business can respond promptly and easily to audit requests.
• Protect sensitive data – An estimated 60 percent of companies copy production data into non-production systems for development, testing and other needs, compromising data confidentiality. The application ILM product family masks nonproduction data, while maintaining its referential integrity and keeping the data characteristics intact. Developers, QA personnel, trainers, and others can effectively use the realistic yet masked data while staying in compliance with internal, industry, and governmental data privacy mandates and regulations.

Informatica Application ILM Product Family

• Support corporate divestitures and reorganizations – To shed less-profitable parts of the business or realign business units to better fit the overall business strategy, the company needs to remove the divested or realigned business unit’s data. The application ILM product family helps the IT team to efficiently separate functionally related data from complex transactional systems, allowing the new organization to become operational faster and to realize quicker time to value.
• Safely retire legacy systems and applications – As the business grows or there are acquisition of additional companies, legacy applications may start to proliferate in the IT environment. These legacy applications are rarely used and most have little ongoing business value. However, they continue to be maintained for compliance reasons, incurring significantly high software license, reduce costs by allowing the application and the supporting hardware and software stack to be shut down, thereby saving on license, maintenance, and administration costs.

The Informatica Application ILM Product Family:
The Informatica application ILM family includes three products that manage various aspects of the application data lifecycle, from testing and development to archiving and retirement.
Informatica Data archive:
Informatica data archive software helps IT organizations manage increasing data volumes in production environments by safely archiving application data, providing seamless access to archived data, delivering the archived data to the business as needed.

 
Information data archive allows the IT team to:

• Identify and move inactive data to another database or to a secure, immutable, highly compressed file
• Use application specific business rules to identify data that is ready to archive, and relocate complete business entities, consisting of related records, to maintain the integrity of archived data
• Easily and seamlessly access archived and active data from the same application user interface
• Access archived data without the use of original application by providing a data discovery portal for searching and browsing data in the file archive and SQL/ODBS/JDBC interface for reporting
• Restore an entire archive, selected business entities, or an archive snapshot to accommodation more frequent access or modification to the data

Informatica Data Subset:
Informatica Data Subset software automates the task of creating smaller, targeted databases from large, complex databases. With referentially intact, smaller targeted copies of production data, IT organisations can dramatically reduce the amount of time, effort, and disk space necessary to support nonproduction environments.

 
Informatica data subset allows the IT team to:

• Quickly create and refresh nonproduction systems with a smaller subset of production data based on time, geography, or business unit instead of having to create a full system or database copy
• Increase quality and reduce time for development and quality assurance by updating nonproduction systems with only relevant, realistic and high quality application data
• Untangle complex transactional systems, separating only functionally related data to create a functionally intact subset of production data
• Select small subset of data to test specific production issues or test-case boundary conditions

Informatica Persistent Data Masking:
Informatica Persistent Data Masking software helps IT organizations prevent the unintended exposure of sensitive or confidential application data, such as credit card information, national identification numbers, names addresses, and phone numbers.
Informatica Persistent data masking allows the IT teams to:

• Mask data in nonproduction systems created from production data copies or subsets, keeping the data realistic and referentially intact yet unidentifiable
• Use sophisticated, flexible masking rules to apply different kinds of masking techniques to different kinds of data while preserving the original characteristics of the data and the overall application functionality
• Comply with international data privacy regulations by masking sensitive and confidential data
• Avoid the risks of expensive data breaches

Informatica ILM – Benefits

Broadcast Support for Packaged and Custom Applications:
With the broadest, richest application-aware metadata for packaged application on the market the application ILM product family provides out of the box support for more than 100 modules within, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and SAP applications, including ERP, HR, CRM, SRM and SCM. Metadata can be easily modified using a simple graphical user interface to accommodate application customization and extensions. New metadata can also be quickly built to handle complete custom applications.
Informatica Application ILM Benefits
Reduce Total cost of Ownership:

• Cost-effectively manage the proliferation of data across a range of enterprise business applications with automated data archiving and subsetting policies and procedures
• Move inactive and infrequently used production data to a less expensive archive infrastructure
• Reduce the total amount of physical storage needed across the enterprise, saving on hardware, licensing, and maintenance costs

Improve Application Performance in Production Systems:

• Enhance production database performance by automatically moving inactive data, based on business rules, to another database or to a secure, highly compressed, immutable file
• Active faster, easier, more cost-effective backup, recovery, replication, and upgrades with less downtime by reducing the size of the production instance
• Reliably meet application service level agreements while spending less time conducting performance tuning and application maintenance

Increase Productivity and Efficiency When Provisioning Nonproduction Systems:

• Dramatically accelerate development and test cycles by using targeted subsets of production data while maintaining full data integrity
• Improve efficiencies by training employees using reliable, production-like data in training environments
• Increase an IT team’s productivity by reusing a comprehensive inventory of subset data objects, instead of coding by hand

Support Regulatory Compliance and Data Governance Programs:

• Safely and cost-effectively archive inactive data, while enabling its easy access, to comply with industry and government regulations and corporate data governance programs
• Ensure adherence to corporate, industry, and governmental retention mandates by archiving complete business entities in a secure, compressed, immutable file
• Enforce and comply with privacy regulations – such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GLBA – by masking sensitive data

Provide audit trails for regulatory compliance and reporting purposes by tracking procedures used for archiving and protecting sensitive data
Reduce the Risk of Data Breaches and Improve Test Data Quality:

• Minimize data breaches by masking confidential information so that it can be shared safely with internal teams or with external vendors or partners
• Quickly fulfill system build, update, and masking requests by using prebuilt or customized sophisticated subsetting and masking techniques
• Maintain appropriate confidentiality and privacy by applying different masking techniques to different kinds of data based on how it will be used

Support Corporate Divestitures and Reorganizations:

• Quickly build a new system for a divested or reorganized business unit by untangling complex operational systems and separating the data along business lines
• Reduce cost and time to build the divested system with no reimplementation costs

Retire Legacy applications Safely:

• Safely decommission legacy applications by relocating the application data and metadata while maintaining transactional and referential integrity
• Save on management, software, and hardware costs by retiring legacy applications and archiving the data within them, while enabling easy access to the data without using the legacy application
• Make the best use of IT infrastructure by repurposing servers and storage allocated to legacy applications to more business-critical IT projects
• Quickly respond to audit requests by using the Informatica data discovery portal to search for and retrieve archived data in an application-independent interface or alternatively by using standard reporting or BI tools

Test Data Management

ILM Test Data management is a software solution to create subset and / or masked copies of production database by leveraging PoorCenter features.

 
Data Subset – Test Data Proliferation:
A. Full sized data warehouse copies take up too much space
B. Testing for upgrades, patches and enhancements require lots of environments
C. Lack of current data in test and dev increases risk and lowers quality
Data Masking – Protect Sensitive Data
A. Sensitive data in test and dev is highly exposed
B. More data in more places increases risk
C. Disparate data warehouse make policy enforcement a challange
D. QA and development professionals need access to data
Informatica Test Data Management:
Building Lean Non-Production Data Warehouses
A. Subset and mask production data warehouse to create QA or other non-production DW
B. Filter on specific detail records (e.g. NA business unit)
C. Expedite and raise quality of production changes while reducing risk
Informatica Test Data Management:
New Applications, New Feeds
A. Subset and mask source production transactional applications
B. Reduce QA load time
C. Ensure sensitive data is masked
D. Load Data Warehouse with realistic data ensuring high quality production changes
 

Informatica Test Data Management

A. Vendor neutral and leverages great connectivity support of PowerCenter
B. Centralized masking and subset policies for heterogeneous applications
C. Predefined masking techniques and framework to customize and extend masking algorithms
D. Sensitive information discovery
E. Graphical view of table relationships
F. Reporting and Analysis
G. Auditing Support
H. Keep clear responsibilities segregation such as compliance manager, auditor, scheduler, techno-functional expert, etc,
Post Install tasks:
A. Assign Roles and Privileges
B. Define / Import database connections
C. Create TDM project
D. Import metadata into TDM project

Roles and privileges

Roles are small sets of privileges which you can assign to specific users like developers, administrators, risk managers, project managers etc.

TDM Roles at TDM Stages: