Originating Author: Peter Burris
As application development (e.g., open source LAMP stack), networking (e.g., WiFi), and end-user device (e.g., iPhone) technologies advance, information system support is introduced into more complex operations domains. In today’s business world, critical contracts are being significantly altered in response to complex queries executed from a telephone in a restaurant late at night and hundreds of miles from a secure terminal.
As a result, opportunities for significant information loss as a consequence of simple human error are increasing dramatically: fingers slip, styluses slide, and buttons are inadvertently pressed. Under traditional regimes for application management (e.g., TP applications), the damage of random human carelessness (to put it nicely) are kept to a minimum by separating the activities of application administration (e.g., pricing table maintenance) and application usage (e.g., change order count). However, new collaborative applications often blend (if not fuse) these two activities (e.g., setting up working groups to pursue a specific opportunity). Consequently, increasingly critical applications are being exposed to the vagaries of human comedy. Continuous data protection (CDP) technologies that can pinpoint recovery activities to specific information objects in “human” time, and that can minimize the effects of a single user’s mistake on a large user community, are emerging as an important tool for storage administrators that cannot depend on an application’s intrinsic recovery function.
Action Item: Continuous data protection (CDP) products should be instituted by IT organizations to protect increasingly complex and critical message-based, collaborative applications (e.g., mail, workflow) as the technologies warrant. Assumptions that an application’s unique approach to restoring function in the event of unique human errors are becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
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