Integrated Data Management

An integrated, modular environment to design, develop, deploy, operate, optimize and govern enterprise data throughout its lifecycle

IBM Optim Integrated Data Management enables organizations to more efficiently and effectively respond to emergent, data-intensive business opportunities, meet service level agreements for data-driven applications, comply with data privacy and data retention regulations and grow the business while driving down total cost of ownership.

• Deliver increasing value across the lifecycle, from requirements to retirement
• Facilitate collaboration and efficiency across roles, via shared artefacts automation and consistent interfaces
• Increase ability to meet service level agreements, improving problem isolation, performance optimization, capacity planning, and workload and impact analysis
• Comply with data security, privacy, and retention policies leveraging shared policy, services, and reporting infrastructure
• Enterprise applications and databases don't just help run your business - they are your business. And every year, they grow in size and complexity - making them harder to manage. Keeping you from meeting service level agreements. Increasing maintenance costs. And exposing you to legal liability as you attempt to protect data privacy and security.

IBM® Optim™ gives you the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle.

• Archive: Tier business transactions by age and status. Segregate historical information from current activity and safely remove it to a secure archive. Maintain production database in a manageable size to simplify maintenance and speed disaster recovery.
• Classify: Apply business rules to govern active, inactive and reference data. Define and implement policies - when data needs to be available, where it should be stored, how long it should be retained and who can have access.
• Assess: Determine where application data is growing fastest and assess the impact of data tiering strategies. Identify and address potential problems before they affect business results.
• Test Data Management: Speed application deployment by streamlining the way you create and manage test environments. Subset and migrate data to build realistic and right sized test databases. Eliminate the expense and effort of maintaining multiple database clones. De-identify confidential information to protect privacy.
• Access: Enable decision makers to access the right data at the right time. Query and browse active, inactive and reference data. Utilize familiar forms, screens and panels. Generate standard and custom reports. Restore archived transactions if business processing becomes a requirement.
• Store: Store application data according to its evolving business value. Maintain active transactions in high speed storage tiers. Relocate reporting data on secure "WORM" devices. Reclaim underutilized capacity and maximize the value of your existing storage infrastructure.

Protect Data Privacy with IBM Optim

Safeguarding the data privacy of critical client data is not just a good business practice - in many cases, it's the law.

IBM® Optim™ delivers powerful data transformation capabilities to mask personal information, so that you can use it safely for application testing.

Protect vulnerable test environments by applying simple data masking techniques - or incorporate detailed transformation algorithms, integrating business rules from many interrelated applications. Using Optim to de-identify test data helps you address compliance requirements and maintain client loyalty.

Manage Data Growth with IBM Optim

Enterprise ERP, CRM and custom applications drive your business initiatives and generate revenue opportunities. Processing more transactions and collecting more customer information may be great for business, but unmanaged data growth can negatively impact your ability to provide superior service and support. The effects can slow application performance, strain financial and technical resources and jeopardize completing business-critical processes on time.

IBM® Optim™ offers a data management solution that solves these problems at the source - by managing your enterprise application data. Optim provides proven archiving capabilities, allowing users to segregate historical from current data and store it securely and cost-effectively.

By reducing the amount of information in the production database, less disk space is required for application data cutting the costs of storage. And because there is less information to sift through, applications process faster. Operations run more efficiently and organizations derive the most business value from mission-critical

Streamline Test Data with IBM Optim

Enterprise data management includes capabilities for streamlining the total application testing process to speed deployment while controlling costs. Improving the way you manage test data can deliver dramatic results - faster time-to-market, reduced development costs and higher quality. In short, enterprise data management helps you do more with less.

IBM® Optim™ offers comprehensive test data management capabilities for creating realistic, right-sized test databases, protecting data privacy in vulnerable development and testing environments and validating test results. You eliminate costly cloning processes and correct defects early in the development process - where they are cheapest and easiest to fix. Most importantly, Optim scales to meet your development and testing requirements, across applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms

Application Retirement with IBM Optim

Budget-savvy CIO's are constantly looking for ways to improve bottom line results. Periodically reviewing your application portfolio can help you identify underperforming or redundant systems where maintenance outweighs business value and formulate application retirement plans.

By decommissioning these systems and applications, companies can optimize their portfolios, reducing cost and risk. Decommissioning is the practice of removing a system, application, database or platform from service, while retaining access to your business-critical data.

IBM® Optim™ makes application retirement easier and safer by providing the capability to archive data in its original business context, preserving each archived business object as an audit-ready "snapshot in time." Optim provides specific archive and retrieval capabilities that address data retention compliance needs, allowing organizations to effectively implement their decommissioning projects.

Retention & E-Discovery with IBM Optim

With the advent of stronger legislation that focus on data retention and accountability, such as King III, Basel II and others, companies across industries face a much higher risk for audits and potential lawsuits. Business information and transactional data must be saved for longer periods of time. Along with increased risk, the associated costs can multiply into millions of dollars.

A key factor in satisfying audit requirements and defending lawsuits, or at a minimum, avoiding costly penalties, is having the capability to retrieve the appropriate information and supporting evidence to meet audit, legal and business requirements. But how can you retain historical transaction records without overloading business critical application databases and jeopardizing performance? How can you ensure a prompt, accurate response to an audit or e-discovery request?

The IBM® Optim™ Data Growth Solution enables organizations to archive and manage precise sets of historical application transaction records and store them safely in a secure archive. Chief Risk and Compliance Officers can ensure an accurate, timely response to audit and e-discovery requests and CIOs and IT directors can quickly locate and produce the exact records requested, thereby limiting the scope of discovery and reducing the potential for expanded inquiry

Most importantly, Optim supports the leading enterprise databases and operating systems, including;

• IBM DB2®
• Oracle®
• Sybase®
• Microsoft® SQL Server®
• IBM Informix®
• IBM IMS™
• IBM VSAM®
• Microsoft Windows®
• UNIX®
• Linux®
• IBM z/OS®

And it supports the key ERP and CRM applications in use today;

• Oracle® E Business Suite
• PeopleSoft® Enterprise
• JD Edwards® EnterpriseOne
• Siebel®
• Amdocs® CRM, as well as your custom and packaged applications.

Optim can help support your compliance initiatives and minimize the risk of incurring fines and penalties enabling you to:

• Collect, manage and store application data to support data retention compliance requirements
• Protect archived data and store it securely in an immutable format
• Respond quickly and accurately to audit and e-discovery requests
• Limit the scope of discovery to only those application transaction records specifically requested
• Manage and store archived data cost-effectively based on its business value and access requirements
• Leverage both native and application-independent access to archived data to satisfy inquiries and reporting requirements.