Data classfication best practices

Data classification benefits from a team effort, whether the exercise is associated with a storage tiering project to manage resources more effectively, an e-discovery initiative in response to a lawsuit or some other result.
What follow is a list of best practices to help storage managers establish data classification strategies.

1. Identify the sources and types of data across your organization. Before classifying data and figuring out which information should be retained, backed up, archived or deleted, it helps to know the applications the organization uses, the value they represent, the types of data they produce and the access patterns.

2. Establish data categories before making technology decisions. What data constitutes a record, and do records need to be stored separately? Do intellectual property documents need to be grouped together? Determining the criteria by which you need to classify information will have an impact on a host of other decisions, so it pays to nail down categories first.

Also consider how deeply you need to classify the data. Will it be enough to organize it by document owner, creation date, file type or application? Or will the organization derive benefits from classifying data by multiple criteria, keywords, concepts or context?

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Source: searchstorage.techtarget.com
By: Carol Sliwa