Continuity of Your Assets

CYA (continuity of your assets) Technologies is not a well-known name and what it does is not a well-known capability.

CYA provides software to support enterprise content management (ECM) systems, to ensure its continued availability. Now, in order to understand what CYA offers we need to go back to basics: what are the bad things that can happen to your documents and other content?

The first and most obvious answer is that the whole system can crash and you lose access to everything. This is where back-up systems like those provided by Symantec (Veritas), Legato, Tivoli and so forth come into their own. CYA doesn’t do this stuff.

The second answer is that you can hit the delete key by mistake, you can have a disk read error, you can have a temporary power outage on your PC, or whatever. In these cases you may lose what you were working on completely or your application may be able to recover at least part of the document that you were working on. However, what it will most certainly lose are any associations that this piece of content may have to other details on your system. For example, there may be annotations attached to a document, there may be digital signatures, there may be links to other content. Even if you can (partially) recover these documents that you were working on, these links may well be lost.

Traditionally, the only way to recover not just the content itself but also all of the links associated with the content was to do a full back-up and restore. But this means taking the whole system down, which is fine when it has gone down anyway but isn’t when only perhaps a single user is affected. This is where CYA comes in.

CYA allows you to recover all content, and its associated properties, without having to take the system down. The software works in conjunction with the leading back-up and restore products (to which CYA provides connectors) so it is not a replacement for these, but something that augments their capabilities.

The bad news is that CYA currently only works in conjunction with Documentum (it needs to understand the metadata within the ECM environment in order to do its thing, and this is relatively complex), though there is good news on the horizon in the fact that the company is exploring the possibility of porting its software to other leading environments such as FileNet and IBM.

As far as we know, CYA is providing a unique capability. Moreover, it serves a real need. We have all heard of case officers turning up in court without all of the relevant evidence and documentation; in the pharmaceutical industry there is extensive paperwork that needs to be associated with new drug approval and any delays cost big money; consider the potential problems if a hospital cannot put its hands on relevant patient notes at the right time; and so on and so forth.

If you are a significant user of Documentum-based ECM, CYA is certainly worth a close look.