Disaster Recovery Report Quarter 1 2013 by Quorum Inc.

1
Disaster Recovery ReportGet your copy of "Quorum
Disaster Recovery Report, Q1 2013"
Download Now
www.quorum.net/drr
2
About The Report
3
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.
4
Key Findings
5
Key Findings

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

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
6
Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime
7
Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Human Error
3 Software Failure
4 Natural Disasters
1 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.
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.
Learning's   After this nightmare, CBA deployed
Quorums hybrid cloud solution to ensure it never
ever happened again.
8
Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Human Error
3 Software Failure
4 Natural Disasters
1 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.
Real World Example An executive of a private
healthcare center in Florida has (more than once)
deleted her entire mailbox.
Learning's   Deployed Quorums 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!
9
Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Human Error
3 Software Failure
4 Natural Disasters
1 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.

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.
Learning's   Invested in Quorums hybrid cloud
disaster recovery system.
10
Four Most Common Causes of System Downtime
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Human Error
3 Software Failure
4 Natural Disasters
1 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.

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.
Learning's   Better prepared than sorry!
11
3 Common Types of Solutions
12
3 Common Types of Solutions
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Cloud Backup
3 Quorums Hybrid Cloud
1 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.

13
3 Common Types of Solutions
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Cloud Backup
3 Quorums Hybrid Cloud
1 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.

14
3 Common Types of Solutions
3 Software Failure
2 Human Error
2 Cloud Backup
3 Quorums Hybrid Cloud
1 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.

15
Conclusion
16
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.

17
Disaster Recovery Report
Download the DR Report
18
Thank You
Stay connected