IBM Eye

News from IBM Hong Kong: IBM to continuously protect information stored on Laptops

IBM today announced new software that enables mobile workers to continuously protect information from computer viruses, file corruption, or accidental deletion of a file. The software, IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, is a “data safety net” that provides real-time back up for important information such as Word documents, MP3 files, digital photos, presentations, and spreadsheets containing sales and tax records.

People today are more likely to be connected to a network as they access high-bandwidth wireless connections in coffee shops, parks, or even entire cities — but that doesn’t mean their data is being protected continuously. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to back up data other than during a scheduled backup session. With IBM’s software, it happens continuously and in one simple solution that can be used for laptops, desktop computers or enterprise file servers.

The software creates a copy on the local machine within milliseconds, and then sends another copy to a remote server. People on-the-go can protect and restore files that are corrupted or accidentally deleted, back to any point in time, even before they were lost – so this adds many layers of defense.

… and …

IBM studies show that loss of data, including time wasted while attempting to restore the information, is among the top problems for mobile workers. While larger companies often have system administrators who handle periodic data backup, this is not a viable option for users working outside traditional office environments, such as sales people traveling between airports or telecommuters who works from home part-time.

This second quote is one of the key aspects of why this technology could be extremely useful. Personally, I work almost exclusively away from the office. The standing joke in our team is that we are in the office only once every 4-6 weeks to drop off our expense claims.

This means I need to be my own IT department, and take responsibility for my own data backups and such - especially when I’m on the road and don’t necessarily have an external hard drive available to make backups with. I actually went to the trouble of setting up my own personal remote backup solution to backup my data over the internet to a server at home - for exactly the reasons mentioned in the press release.

I know most people aren’t capable of setting something like this up for themselves, so this IBM solution will be potentially very useful. I’d like to see us implement that locally … I’ll have to talk to some of the local CIO people and see if they are working on anything like this for mobile users.