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August - 2013 issue

Businesses Moving Beyond Backup-Restore Paradigm

By Larry Lang, CEO, QuorumLabs

San Jose based Quorum provides one-click backup, recovery and continuity. Founded in 2008, the company has raised $16.3 million from Toba Capital, Airtek Capital Group and Themis Computer.

The IT industry is constantly changing. It is a challenge to not only keep up with new technologies that hit the market, but to figure out how to make them an asset to your business.
Virtualization and cloud-services are two fairly recent and common examples. As an entrepreneur, I need to quickly evaluate how these two large shifts in IT culture are affecting not only our product line, but our customers’ environments. Recognizing what new technologies will have a long shelf life and figuring out how to fold them into what we offer will always be part of the challenge in this space.

In the backup and data recovery space, the trend that has me most excited is businesses moving beyond the old backup-restore paradigm and instead turning to cloud-bases Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). In this model, enterprises both run their production servers and disaster recovery nodes in the cloud. DRaaS is attractive from a cost-savings standpoint. Enterprises pay for the cloud based on useage, their infrastructure scales automatically and recovery comes built into the entire process.
A fully cloud-based environment eases management and offers low up-front payments. However, companies interested in DRaaS must be cognizant of the fact that they are handing over control of their IT environment and systems recovery to a third party. As this trend matures, you will hear more about things like suitable service-level agreements as a key to cloud adoption and verifying the speed of data recovery, which is not always guaranteed to be instant.

We are heading into an era where backing up data, and continuously testing your IT environment become the norm. Backup and testing are not something you can push to the bottom of your to-do list anymore. In this always-on, always connected era, it is just too much of a risk not to have these tasks at the forefront of an IT guy’s agenda. I often point to a statistic from the Aberdeen Group: one hour of downtime costs a mid-sized business an average of $74,000. With that cost in mind, more organizations will be embracing regular, consistent testing to identify changes, inconsistencies and problems in their organization's IT environment.