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Continuous Data Protection: Securing Data (continued)

"Say a virus gets into your system, and you don't realize it for several hours," says Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts Inc., a storage-management consultancy based in Santa Barbara, Calif. "You want to go back to that exact point in time before that virus was introduced. The difference between CDP and the traditional periodic backups of data -- even if done every hour -- is that with traditional methods, you can lose a substantial amount of work. This can be serious for many professionals, but for people in the financial services or other transaction-intensive industries it can be disastrous."

And it seems that IT managers are getting it. A recent survey by Peripheral Concepts found that the number of enterprise sites that have already implemented CDP grew from 34 percent in 2005 to 43 percent this year. In 2007, that number will increase to 58 percent. 

And, according to the participants in the study, CDP is extremely easy to justify: return on investment (ROI) of implementing CDP was achieved in less than two years by 61 percent of respondents.

Why Wait?
Given the overwhelming arguments in favor of implementing CDP, why are some enterprises still hesitating? There are several reasons, according to Karp. "Most CDP products have been developed by smaller vendors, which makes enterprises nervous," he says. "Moreover, they are stand-alone products, not integrated with the mainstream data backup applications sold by larger vendors." What's required: easy integration of CDP with enterprises' existing backup and recovery products and processes.

Understandably, most IT managers are reluctant to force their employees to learn yet another backup tool. "But when CDP is integrated and accepted as an 'evolutionary' improvement to existing backup-and-recovery processes," adds Karp, "sales of the technology will really take off."

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