Disaster Recovery ReportGet your copy of "Quorum Disaster Recovery Report, Q1 2013"

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About The Report

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

About The Report

The report talks about the Time and Cost of bouncing back from a disaster and how Small to Mid-Sized companies Safeguard their data.

Further, the report presents findings of the frequency of various disasters, from Hardware failures to the more infrequent - Natural Disasters.

Real-world examples culled from customer feedback from Quorum's IT support center bring home the point.

This report is built around the fact that disasters caused by Hardware Failures are far more in number to those caused by Nature.

Key Findings

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Key Findings

This infographic depicts the four most common causes of system downtime:

1. Hardware Failure 55%

2. Human Error 22%

3. Software Failure 18%

4. Natural Disasters 5%

This infographic depicts the four most common causes of system downtime:

Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime

Real World Example: In 2010, Randy Mateo, IT manager at California Bankers Assoc. (CBA), noticed a multiple hard drive failure on CBA's SAN. In quick succession, the company's Citrix XEN servers began failing. An investigation determined that with the hard drive failure, the primary SAN server corrupted the company's virtual servers, and all the data on them. It then replicated onto the secondary SAN.

Thankfully, Mateo had manually backed up most of the virtual servers using a utility on the XEN servers. The Microsoft Exchange server, however, was a different story. Since it wasn't backed up, they had to rebuild it. Resulting in CBA being down.

55%

Learning's: After this nightmare, CBA deployed Quorum’s hybrid cloud solution to ensure it never ever happened again.

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error2: Human Error 3: Software Failure 4: Natural Disasters1: Hardware Failure

Storage-area network (SAN) failures are among the common hardware-failure disasters many small to mid-sized businesses experience. It's usual for these businesses to have a large SAN, and all storage servers virtualized onto that SAN. Unfortunately, this means that when the SAN dies, a company's entire environment dies with it.

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Real World Example: An executive of a private healthcare center in Florida has (more than once) deleted her entire mailbox.

Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime

22%

Learning's: Deployed Quorum’s disaster recovery system that takes incremental snapshots of the center's servers; the executive was able to recover valuable correspondence and avoid certain personal disaster!

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error2: Human Error 3: Software Failure 4: Natural Disasters1: Hardware Failure

Not all disasters are a cause by technical difficulties. According to this report, 22 % of disasters are caused by Human Error. This could include accidentally wiping out a file system on a server.

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime

Real World Example: An IT director at Sente Mortgage in Texas, recalls a software failure during a routine software upgrade to the company's loan origination software. It was necessary to revert to a previous version. In doing this, he discovered that the system's backed-up SQL data was corrupt and unusable. Ultimately, this was all attributed to an underlying file structure problem, but the result was at least four hours of system downtime.

18%

Learning's: Invested in Quorum’s hybrid cloud disaster recovery system.

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error2: Human Error 3: Software Failure 4: Natural Disasters1: Hardware Failure

● Software Failure ranks third in overall disasters at 18 %.● The issue lies in the lack of attention to testing patches before they are sent out,

resulting in corruption of applications that can bring down entire systems.

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Real World Example: Talent recruiting firm 24 Seven, Inc. prepared early. Along with deploying a solid disaster recovery system, IT professionals at the company also tested the system regularly to ensure it would perform in a real disaster. So when Super storm Sandy hit on October 29, 2012, the company was ready. Even though its New York headquarters office was forced to close during the storm, operations critical to the health of the company went along uninterrupted, thanks to foresight and due diligence.

Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime

Learning's: Better prepared than sorry!

5%

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error2: Human Error 3: Software Failure 4: Natural Disasters1: Hardware Failure

● Natural Disasters ( tornadoes/earthquakes etc.) comprise a mere 5 %.● 70 % of small firms that experience a major data loss due to natural disasters

go out of business within a year.

3 Common Types of Solutions

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 Common Types of Solutions

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error 2: Cloud Backup 3: Quorum’s Hybrid Cloud1: Tape and Disk Backup

● But their foothold as the preferred method is weakening as their drawbacks become ever clearer; specifically, their expense and complexity, and their inability to recover systems and applications in real time.

● Given the prohibitive cost of downtime for small to mid-sized businesses, hours- or days-long lags in restoration are devastating.

● Further, regular testing is also particularly difficult and time-consuming with these solutions, and many products do not even offer testing as a functionality.

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 Common Types of Solutions

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error 2: Cloud Backup 3: Quorum’s Hybrid Cloud1: Tape and Disk Backup

● Cloud backup has more recently emerged as an alternative to tape and disk backup, leveraging virtualization and the cloud to make data backup more convenient.

● Still, for small to mid-sized businesses, cloud backup alone can sometimes make recovery times worse because of the limited Internet bandwidth available to them. And if a large amount of data must be recovered, it still involves shipping physical media, which defeats the main purpose of the move from offsite tape to cloud.

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 Common Types of Solutions

#3: Software Failure#2: Human Error 2: Cloud Backup 3: Quorum’s Hybrid Cloud1: Tape and Disk Backup

● Hybrid cloud solutions present a reliable alternative to both tape and disk backup and cloud backup alone, as they deliver the advantages of virtualized data center replication without the high cost and complexity.

● These solutions function by maintaining up-to-date, ready-to-run virtual machine clones of a company's critical systems that can run locally or in the cloud. And because they transparently take over for failed servers within minutes, recovery is instant and business-as-usual resumes without impact.

● In addition, testing in environments that have deployed a hybrid cloud solution is made easy with automatic and on-demand capabilities.

Conclusion

© 2013 QuorumLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Conclusion

● Results from the Quorum Disaster Recovery Report underscore the notion that a "disaster" has many definitions, and can occur at any time.

● Therefore, preparation is key. So, too, is the solution choice, as disaster recovery is only valuable if it helps small to mid-sized businesses avoid any length of downtime.

● Therefore, it is imperative to deploy a system that enables automatic testing to shore up confidence that the solution will work as expected in an actual disaster.

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