CYA, Analysts Predict Growing Demand for Granular, Application-Aware ECM Recovery in 2008

The need for granular, application-aware enterprise content management (ECM) recovery solutions will grow dramatically in 2008 as concerns over compliance and application availability continue to increase, according to CYA Technologies, the only provider of complete granular recovery solutions for ECM systems.

Compliance mandates requiring the preservation and recoverability of both content and its associated metadata (audit trails, digital signatures, renditions, etc.) in their original state are increasingly affecting multiple industries. Companies in the life sciences, financial services, and chemical, oil, and gas industries, among others, must comply with a variety of mandates, including FDA 21 CFR Part 11, SEC 17a-4, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure eDiscovery Amendment, and EPA 40 CFR 792.185. Ramifications of non-compliance can include significant legal fines, business shutdowns and brand exposure.

While traditional enterprise backup and recovery solutions enable companies to restore the ECM system to its last good state in the event of a system failure, this results in the loss of all content and metadata added to the system since the last backup -- which has often been performed days or weeks prior to the failure. If the lost information is needed for eDiscovery proceedings, organizations find themselves unable to produce the information in a timely manner as required. While lost content and its metadata can be painstakingly recreated and re-associated, the act of doing so means that the information is no longer in its original state, putting organizations in violation of regulatory mandates requiring the preservation and recoverability of the original information.

In addition, traditional recovery methods typically require that the entire ECM system be brought down, resulting in the reduction of productivity and worldwide accessibility, as well as potential revenue loss. According to Gartner, tolerance for application downtime is rapidly declining, with scheduled application downtime windows shrinking as companies invest in resilient architectures and IT management processes mature(1).

Furthermore, business requirements have been driving a major reduction in Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)(2). With 80 percent of ECM information loss due not to full system failures, but rather incidents affecting one, several, or thousands of pieces of information(3), companies need to invest in application-aware recovery solutions that can preserve and recover granular ECM content and metadata in its original state while keeping the ECM system online.

"We live in the information world, and we manage and consume information using applications. Consequently, to meet RTOs and RPOs we have to focus first and foremost on ensuring application-aware recovery without system downtime," said Raymond Paquet, Managing Vice President, Gartner. "The information within ECM systems is more than just data -- it's content that's associated with audit trails, workflows, and other critical metadata. Application-aware recovery of this information is critical not only for meeting RTOs and RPOs, but also for enabling compliance and meeting global business demands."

CYA believes that the growing need for application-aware recovery solutions will drive increased demand in 2008 for its flagship product, CYA SmartRecovery(TM), which is the only solution providing granular, application-aware recovery of ECM content and metadata without any ECM system downtime. The company already has a strong and growing base of users in the life sciences industry that includes Fortune 2000 organizations such as Astra Zeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Pfizer, and Schering-Plough, which all depend on CYA SmartRecovery to safeguard their FDA submissions. Other industries in which CYA has a burgeoning client base include the tightly regulated aerospace, chemical, oil and gas, and financial services industries.

"2008 will be a banner year for CYA as more industries recognize that granular, application-aware recovery is critical to maintaining compliance, ensuring business continuity, and achieving increasingly stringent RTOs and RPOs," said Wayne Crandall, president and CEO of CYA Technologies. "We're responding to the anticipated increase in demand by developing new ECM recoverability features and products, as well as by continuing to grow strategic relationships with leading vendors including EMC, IBM, OpenText and Microsoft."

"Your disaster recovery plan may be rock solid, but the majority of ECM recovery needs involve one or multiple documents that have been lost or corrupted due to human and programmatic errors, viruses or malfeasance -- incidents which often go unreported because the information is thought to be recoverable only with a traditional solution that requires taking the system offline," continued Crandall. "IT managers need to know that there are ways to recover information that don't result in system downtime, additional data loss, data synchronicity issues and compliance risk. CYA solutions provide a cost-effective way to reduce unplanned downtime, recover quickly from information loss, enable compliance and decrease the frequency with which the ECM system needs to be brought down for backups."