"Telcos often start with customer data," he said. "But many companies start with email archiving, partly due to the compliance issue."

This is how China Light and Power (CLP) started off its ILM implementation.

"We are using a 'pillar' approach, meaning individual applications," said Andre Blumberg, technology and architecture manager, CLP. "Email and file services are our key priority here and we are actively looking at solutions that exist today for implementation in 1H 2006."

At HKJC, the ILM initiative was applied first on data from its critical applications, said Ngai. The company also implemented ILM on data that needed re-defined service levels.

"After the data discovery exercise, we have a pretty good idea which data needs to [be] replaced within the storage infrastructure," he added.