Storage Toolkit

Veritas helps firms track data

Ed Frauenheim CNET News.com

Published: 04 Nov 2003 13:25 GMT

Continuing a tech industry push on regulatory compliance, Veritas Software is announcing a product to help companies abide by rules and manage their data.

The storage-software company plans on Tuesday to introduce "Veritas Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0," which aims to help organisations meet regulatory requirements for data management and retention. Veritas said the software is designed to handle email and file archiving in Microsoft Exchange and Windows NT file system formats. The product is slated to be released during the first quarter of 2004.

"With our new Data Lifecycle Manager software, record retention and retrieval now extends across the entire enterprise, from the desktop to the data centre to the vault," Veritas chief executive Gary Bloom said in a statement.

Data-lifecycle management, a much-discussed storage-industry concept, refers to assigning data to storage devices depending on its value over time. Data that is critical to a business this week, for example, may deserve a spot on an expensive, high-end device, but later on it could be moved to a less costly machine.

Veritas also is announcing an upgrade to its backup and recovery software NetBackup, and an upgrade to its CommandCentral Service product, which is designed to let organisations set different levels of data backup and recovery quality.

Corporate compliance with relatively new regulations is expected to boost the information technology sector. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which sets privacy rules for medical records kept in digital files, is expected to result in $1bn (£590m) to $17bn in spending.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires sweeping corporate disclosure and financial reporting reform, also could be a goldmine for tech firms. According to AMR Research, companies will spend up to $2.5bn to comply with the law this year, with nearly 77 percent of companies saying they will spend more on information technology, business process change, corporate governance and/or consulting.

Veritas has plenty of company in attempting to tap this market. On Monday, both Oracle and SAP introduced products aimed at helping businesses comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Check Point Software also have products they say can help companies comply with regulations.

Veritas said its CommandCentral Service product is an integral part of its compliance offering. CommandCentral Service 3.5 allows IT departments to set different levels of data backup and recovery, according to the company. For example, data from a company's finance department could be backed up more carefully than data from the human resources department.

Glenn Groshank, Veritas director of product marketing, said the software allows an organisation to set up a kind of internal utility, in which business units are "charged" for the amount of backup and recovery service the IT department provides.

Veritas is one of several companies pushing the concept of "utility computing," in which computing is treated as a service similar to electricity or water.