June 8, 2016

Technology: it moves at the speed of light. Well, some areas do. Others lag behind which creates a mishmash of solutions in your tech stack. Some are advanced, moving fast, integrating seamlessly and delivering the highest benefits of recent innovation. Others plod along delivering the same benefits that were impressive a decade ago but today ... not so much.

If there's one area that can fall into the latter category, it's backup and disaster recovery. It’s not that powerful, effective solutions aren’t available. They are. But plenty of businesses don't prioritize this aspect of their security. They tend to dedicate budget to protecting their perimeter, and pay less attention to how they will get back up and running after a problem occurs. They figure that their current solution is good enough.

Sometimes they cut even more corners and backup only some files, because they think protecting all their data and servers would be too expensive. They skip testing their backups. Or they simply haven’t kept pace with developments in this space, and don’t realize the cost-effective and advanced solutions that are available. So they stick with their legacy systems.

Two reasons this is a foolhardy approach:

Money. If you’re using an old-school backup and disaster recovery program, you’re probably wasting resources on all kinds of inefficiencies. Maybe you’re babysitting multiple vendors, and still experiencing cringe-worthy levels of downtime. Your team spends time and money trying to ensure continuity, but still loses business to outages and other problems. And speaking of lost money, there’s the other reason….

Crime. Criminals are smart. They don’t design their attacks in a vacuum. They know where you're strong and where you're weak, and they know that many of you don’t have fast and reliable backup and data recovery. Ransomware is a great example of this. Attackers bank on the probability that you can't quickly and easily failover to an exact replica of your production system. That you’re going to have to fork over that Bitcoin because you didn’t invest in an advanced recovery solution.

To tie those two together: more than $209 million in Ransomware payments were made in the U.S. just in the first 3 months of this year. That’s up from $25 million for all of 2015. So if you think yesterday’s solution is going to protect you, know that many other companies have made the same mistake – and it cost them.

Here’s what modern, innovative backup and data recovery looks like in Quorum’s world:

• High availability, fast backup and cloud failover from a single product

• Simple and painless deployments

• Protection for both virtual and physical environments

• Automated testing

• The ability to failback to similar or different hardware, from physical to virtual, virtual to virtual, or virtual to physical hardware

• Always-accurate up to date clones that can take over for failed servers within minutes

• Secure datacenters that deliver the highest performance and stability

If it seems like we’re bragging, that’s not our goal. We just want to make sure you know better options are out there – and that your business can stay safe from whatever attack or failure is headed your way.

Because in the end, other businesses are seeing the light and entering the new era of backup and disaster recovery. Businesses sticking with legacy systems are putting their apps, their servers and their data at risk. Take a look at all the ways onQ can make your IT life smoother and easier and find out what a modern BDR solution can offer you.