ILM is comprised of the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business processes through management of policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data.
Much of ILM happens outside the system and has to do with communication between the different departments in your organization. Many of the processes involved in ILM are automated and are increasingly being supported through new technological developments.
As a matter of fact, ILM cannot work on its own, it needs support through suitable products and tools. The ILM solution from SAP comprises dedicated products that address all aspects of ILM: structured and unstructured data, data from live and legacy systems, and from SAP and non-SAP systems.