As organizations move to apply various technologies over their categories of data, Sargeant suggested to take incremental steps. ILM involves many elements, including backup and recovery, data provisioning, automated data classification and hierarchical storage management.

Since the technology maturity among these elements vary, he recommended implementing ILM by adopting the elements according to their maturity. Elements like backup and recovery are quite mature and very much interoperable in a heterogeneous environment, while the automated classification of data is still very much nascent.

"It's like the old saying, you need to learn to crawl before you could walk," he said. "Organizations have to put in place a lot of different elements that would ultimately form an ILM implementation."

The pillar approach

Apart from prioritizing technology adoption, enterprises should also prioritize the implementation of ILM based on the criticality of data, noted Choudhary from HP.