Quorum suggests thinking beyond backup

Larry Lang, CEO of Quorum, dropped by in December to discuss his company's views of trends in the use of cloud-based backup and recovery solutions (see Quorum Reveals Predictions for the 2013 Disaster Recovery Market for details). I was unable to comment on our discussion due to other commitments. Sorry Larry!

While at first glance, this appeared to be yet another self-serving set of predictions and marketing disguised as news, the conversation turned out to be very informative and quite useful.

Quorum believes that organizations would be better served if they focused more on recovery than merely on backup. This focus, the company believes, would cause them to consider the effects of unexpected downtime and develop plans to quickly bounce back after an outage. Since these plans would have to be based upon a priority list of recovery actions, important systems would come up first and allow the company to get back to its business operations quickly. This goes far beyond just bringing files back from back up media to building a complete understanding of what workloads are important; how workloads interact with one another; and what manual and automatic processes are necessary to reconstruct the IT infrastructure.

Quorum believes that the proper planning and use of both onsite and cloud-based services will come to be the norm.

While I'm not sure I agree with Larry's timeline, I believe his suggestions concerning proper planning and taking a holistic viewpoint are well taken. I believe it just might be worthwhile to take a few moments to visit Quorum's website to review his comments and predictions.