White Papers. Best Business Practices in Implementing IBM Optim. Abstract. Seemakiran Head of India Operations

Transcription

1 Best Business Practices in Implementing IBM Optim White Papers Abstract Enterprise applications and databases do not just help in running the business - they are your business. And every year, they grow in size and complexity, making them harder to manage. Uncontrolled data growth threatens application performance and service level agreements, increases maintenance costs, and exposes enterprises to legal liability for data privacy and security. Moreover, the need to effectively manage data across the enterprise impacts management, business users and the IT organization. Management is concerned with the efficient utilization of information assets and the resources required to manage them. Business users care about the availability and accuracy of data. IT is concerned with data backup, recovery, migration, upgrade and security. Seemakiran Head of India Operations Estuate 1183 Bordeaux Dr, Suite 4 Sunnyvale, CA Phone: Fax: IBM Optim Solutions are enterprise data management products that address the critical issues of data growth management, data privacy compliance, test data management, e-discovery, and application upgrades, migrations and retirements. IBM Optim Solutions align application data management with business objectives to optimize performance, mitigate risks and control costs. They deliver capabilities that scale across various enterprise applications, databases and platforms. This paper profiles the best business practices that we have developed in our Optim practice to ensure that our clients get the most value out of their Optim implementation. January 2009

2 Estuate is a global information technology (IT) services company based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our founders have decades of deep software product experience at Oracle, particularly in Oracle-based applications development, integration and modernization, and unmatched Oracle E-Business Suite product knowledge. Our focus is two-fold: Providing expert software product development services to software companies Providing high-value application implementation and management services to enterprise clients. We pride ourselves on being highly-responsive, nimble and efficient, and we are very honored to let our clients speak on our behalf. Our software product development focus includes core product development and testing, business process integration and technology modernization. Our software company clients include Arena Solutions, Cisco, Citrix, Escalate, HP Mercury, IBM, Oracle, Performant, Pictage, Salesforce.com, DataFlux (division of SAS) and WebEx. Our enterprise application implementation and management focus is on custom application development and the full Oracle E-Business Suite platform. Our enterprise application clients include Bechtel, Fox Interactive Media, Matson, Stanford University, Visa and Wells Fargo. For more information, please contact [email protected] or visit Copyright 2009 Estuate Inc. All rights reserved. Content from IBM Optim documentation has been used in this document. 2

3 Contents 1. Best Business Practices in Implementing IBM Optim Overview of IBM Optim IBM Optim Data Growth Solution Best Practices IBM Optim Decommissioning Solution Best Practices IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution Best Practices IBM Optim Data Privacy Solution Best Practices Conclusion 12 3

4 Overview of IBM Optim Enterprise data management (EDM) focuses on the creation of accurate, consistent and transparent data content. EDM emphasizes data precision, privacy and meaning, and is concerned with how the content is integrated into business applications, as well as how it is passed along from one business process to another. IBM Optim Solutions are enterprise data management software products that provide the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle. Optim - An Enterprise Data Management Solution 4

5 An Overview of IBM Optim Solutions 5

6 IBM Optim Data Growth Solution Best Practices Estuate has implemented IBM Optim s Data Growth Solution for numerous clients to control their unmanaged data growth at the source, by proactively managing their enterprise application data. Unmanaged data growth can negatively impact application performance and strain financial and technical resources, jeopardizing the completion of business-critical processes on schedule. Using IBM Optim, we also apply application logic and validation rules to help ensure that application integrity is maintained. IBM Optim provides predefined built-in templates that define the most common business objects within leading ERP and CRM application products, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. These templates can also be customized or used to develop new templates for specific business requirements. Criteria are commonly based on functional requirements or data retention regulations. IBM Optim identifies all transactions that meet these criteria and moves them into the archive. Archiving can be automated to execute at specific times by using any third-party job scheduler or within IBM Optim itself. Optim Data Growth Solution Overview Once the data is archived, only the most current data is maintained in the production environment, which helps to maintain high application performance. The archived data can be maintained in mid-tier storage at lower cost while still meeting service targets. The archived data (historical or reference data) can also be stored in secure WORM, tape or any other storage devices. This Optim-based archived data can then be directly accessed by using Crystal Reports, Jasper Reports, Oracle Discoverer or any SQL-based reporting tool. 6

7 Optim Storage Utilities-Archive Data Storage and Retention Policies 7

8 IBM Optim Decommissioning Solution Best Practices Decommissioning is the practice of retiring a system, application, database or platform from service, while retaining access to business-critical data. IBM Optim makes application decommissioning easy and safe by providing the capability to archive data in its original business context, preserving each archived business object as an audit-ready snapshot in time. IBM Optim provides specific archive and retrieval capabilities that address data retention compliance needs, allowing organizations to effectively implement their decommissioning projects. By decommissioning these systems and applications, companies can optimize their portfolios, reducing cost and risk. This process enables application migration from a highcost operating platform to a lower-cost platform. Moreover, it also reduces hardware, maintenance and upgrade costs. Estuate has executed IBM Optim decommissioning projects for several clients with earlier versions of Oracle E- Business Suite running on various hardware platforms. Even though the applications and hardware were retired, the application data remained accessible through Optim using popular reporting tools as mentioned in the previous section. 8

9 IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution Best Practices Managing test data proactively using the IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution helps deliver faster time-to-market, reduced development costs and higher quality for both package and custom enterprise applications. We have implemented test data management solutions for our clients using IBM Optim. For each production instance, enterprise IT organizations typically maintain multiple clones of the production environment for backup, development, test, upgrade assessment, training, quality assurance and other activities. This leads to uncontrolled investments in hardware to store and manage these data sets. Maintenance burdens increase. Rolling out new application features takes much more time, effort and resources. An effective way to reduce the cost and overhead of test data management is by subsetting production data for test purposes. IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution is an ideal product to achieve these goals.. Traditional Method of Data Replication We have used the IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution for our clients to create realistic, rightsized test databases, protecting data privacy in development and testing environments, and validating test results. This helps to eliminate expensive cloning processes and correct defects early in the development process where they are cheapest and easiest to fix. In addition, IBM Optim scales to meet virtually any development or testing requirements across applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms. 9

10 Test Data Management Using IBM Optim Subsetting Additionally, we have built optimized test environments to create targeted test scenarios designed to trigger specific error conditions. A simplistic, one-dimensional view of test data is typically insufficient for this purpose. Data from multiple tables is extracted for comprehensive test data. After a test run, IBM Optim analyzes the before and after images of the test data, automatically detects any differences, and presents the results in a concise report. It also provides comparative results in a highlighted display for easy analysis, saving countless hours. IBM Optim improves all phases of application testing. An intuitive, online interface and full-function browse utility eliminate time-consuming and error-prone tableby-table comparisons. IBM Optim not only identifies the expected database changes, but also uncovers differences that might otherwise go undetected. Those application issues that are hidden or difficult to trace can be identified quickly and resolved at a fraction of the cost. 10

11 IBM Optim Data Privacy Solution Best Practices Safeguarding the privacy of data is not just good business practice, in many cases, it s the law. Deidentifying confidential data is one of the best ways to protect privacy and support compliance initiatives. We have implemented the IBM Optim Data Privacy Solutoin for our clients by masking and transforming the sensitive data in their applications. By masking personal information, IBM Optim protects the privacy and security of confidential customer data, and ensures compliance with local, state, national, international and industry-based privacy regulations. Data de-identification enables developers, testers and trainers to use realistic data and produce valid test results, while still complying with privacy protection rules. De-identified data is generally considered acceptable to use in non-production environments and ensures that even if the data is stolen, exposed or lost, it will be of no use to anyone. 11

12 Conclusion By implementing IBM Optim for numerous clients, we have leveraged IBM Optim s complete enterprise data management solutions across multiple databases and applications for the entire information lifecycle of an enterprise. We find that IBM Optim, when properly implemented using our best practices, provides efficient, high-performing, reliable and secure applications and data within the enterprise. 12