Quorum Industries
Quorum Knows Your Needs Are Unique
While Quorum’s technology can be broadly applied to any IT environment where there is a need to eliminate downtime, we know that every industry has some special requirements. In some cases it’s the need to pass an external audit without any advanced notification. In others it’s specific regulations that require all data passing through your systems to be encrypted while in transit, at rest, and all cases in-between. And many of the customers we support have limitations in the amount of human effort they can put to meeting these requirements, which is why our DRaaS offering is perfect for meeting those challenges with minimal expense. In the following pages you can better understand how we uniquely meet the specific issues of your business.
Education:
Recovery time should be measured in minutes, not days
At 9:00 a.m. sharp on registration day, over 10,000 students will be logging into computers to register for classes. At the same time, a marketing message will be sent to over 30,000 alumni, requesting a donation. Adding to the challenge, at least 5,000 students and professors are accessing important stored data regarding research they are conducting across the campus. All of this is taking place while school administrators are entering invoices into accounts payable and journal entries into the general ledger.
Due to their vast size and multi-purpose nature, IT disasters happen nearly every day on college and university campuses. The key to a successful Disaster Recovery plan is accepting that IT disasters are going to happen. However, with right solution and proper preparation, users never need to feel the effect of an interruption.
Basics of a Disaster Recovery Plan
To keep users happily unaware of IT malfunctions, university and college administrators need to ensure that computers systems will continue operating regardless of the size of a disaster. Achieving this goal will include the following:
- Data Redundancy – In today’s operating environment, keeping only one copy of a file or table is inviting disaster. Data tables must be copied and stored in an alternative location in case the first copy becomes corrupted.
- Data Availability – Whether a professor is performing research or a student is signing up for classes, computer systems must be available for use.
- Failover – When a disaster occurs, backup systems need to be quickly switched on with little or no interruption to services.
In the past, creating a recovery plan that address all of these issues would involve purchasing expensive servers and paying for recovery services. Today, a Disaster Recovery plan that addresses all of the above areas is within the reach of nearly every learning institution.
Quorum – An Affordable Disaster Recovery Solution
Quorum’s Hybrid Cloud Solution provides an comprehensive and simple way to recover the most critical applications and data after any storage, systems, or site failure. With our solution, critical university applications and data are stored both locally and in the cloud, ensuring that they are always available to run when a disaster strikes.
Key Benefits:
- Complete Redundancy – Other solutions may create redundancy by backing up data at night. However, if a system loss occurs at the end of the data, a whole days worth of work cannot be restored. With Quorum, data can be automatically backed up at multiple points during the day, creating redundancy and preventing the loss of a full day of work.
- High Availability – Other recovery solutions take at least 24 hours to perform restore services. With Quorum, the hybrid appliance/cloud solution was built to be constantly running as a many-to-one failover server. If the primary servers are to fail, Quorum can be used as the replacement server, ready to operate within one minute.
- One-Touch Failover – In the past, Disaster Recovery plans included a tape backup system, so that restoring a system involved obtaining the tape backup first. With Quorum, the backup system can be activated with the touch of a button ensuring that restores are measured in minutes, not days.
The true test of a Disaster Rcovery solution is whether the users were even aware a disaster occurred. Quorum can help ensure that your university or college is protected from any interruptions.
Financial Services:
Assessing, identifying, and prioritizing Disaster Recovery threats
Banking and insurance professionals practically wrote the book on identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risk and developing strategies to transfer or avoid the threat. Although these professionals may be good at risk management for their clients, they do not always apply the same principles to their own business.
Recent industry surveys estimate that three out of four financial service firms have not addressed every possible scenario within their Disaster Recovery planning. And while some companies may have developed plans preparing for catastrophic events like Hurricane Sandy, the majority have not addressed business interruptions that may be caused by human error, incompatible system updates, or environmental problems within the data center. In fact, within the last year at least 85% of financial services companies have experienced server downtime.
The expense associated with business disruptions can be significant. According to theses same surveys, the cost of outages range from $100,000 to $5 million depending upon the size of the company.
Basing Disaster Recovery Planning on the Principles of Risk Management
Like good risk management, a good recovery plan will seek to minimize the negative consequences that occur due to a business interruption. A core component of this plan should be a software solution that ensures the availability of your data no matter the circumstance.
The software solution needs to be able to backup all your business data including the operating system and should be continuously running in the background to ensure that the most recent data is available in the event of an interruption. The solution should be simple to use and quick to deploy.
Why Choose Quorum?
Quorum’s exclusive onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution, also known as DRaaS, provides a comprehensive way for financial firms to recover the most critical applications and data from the cloud after any storage, systems, or site failure.
Key Benefits:
- Regular Backups – Other solutions may lock you out of the system while the backup is performed. With Quorum, backups occur without any interruption to business operations and can be set to run as frequently as 15 minutes or at the end of each day. More importantly, our solution is designed to replicate your entire system (including operating systems), all without slowing down your network.
- High Availability – Other Disaster Recovery solutions take at least 24 hours to perform restore services. With Quorum, the hybrid appliance/cloud solution was built to be constantly running as a many-to-one failover server. If the primary server were to fail, Quorum can be ready as the replacement server within one minute.
- Easy to Install – Other solutions require weeks of planning and service provider costs before a tape system or redundant server is up and running. In contrast, Quorum is intuitively designed so that it can be setup and deployed within a few days. In addition, the most important business continuity functions can be activated with just the push of a button.
Two days after Hurricane Sandy, the “storm of the century,” pounded New York City, the New York Stock Exchange was back open because they had planned a contingency for that type of risk. With Quorum, financial service firms can have the same comfort that their business will continue to operate as planned, whether in the face of a small interruption or a large disaster.
Health Care:
Disaster Recovery when data saves lives
Imagine an emergency situation where a patient is unconscious and needs care immediately. Suddenly, a power outage causes the computers to lose their connection to the database. Since the hospital moved to electronic medical records but did not develop a business continuity plan, this outage has blindsided doctors who are now unsure of the patient’s blood type and whether they are allergic to certain medicines.
With paper-based medical records, healthcare administrators never had to worry about doctors not having access to patient information. The information was always available within the file, but was limited to the hospital in which it was stored. However, as medical providers begin to migrate into a paperless environment, having access to patient data is becoming a matter of life and death. Losing a system for even a few minutes could put people’s health in jeopardy.
The Time is Now
Over the last few years, a number of factors have emerged that make an IT business continuity solution like Quorum no longer an option, but a requirement:
- As part of HIPAA compliance, health care providers must perform a business impact analysis (BIA), which establishes a recovery plan for critical IT systems
- Joint Commission audits also assess the business continuity environment
- Establishing meaningful use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems consequently brings the need for instant recovery of them
- Demonstrating HIT (healthcare IT) funding is delivering on the promise of improved patient outcomes and better point-of-care services
Business Continuity Plans with Patients in Mind
Disaster Recovery teams face a number of challenges when designing business continuity plans for the healthcare industry. First, there is the enormous amount of data that is created and saved by healthcare professionals, including test results, MRIs, patient history, and even digital pictures. Next, there is the need to provide real time information access to both medical professionals and healthcare administrators. Finally, as best practices suggest, an offsite data storage program is an invaluable component of a business continuity plan, it is important to remember that the offsite storage must meet all HIPAA compliance standards.
Quorum – Business Continuity Planning with the Potential to Save Lives
Quorum’s Hybrid Cloud Solution provides the healthcare industry with the tools necessary to provide uninterrupted access to key data components like patient history. With our comprehensive solution, critical applications and data are stored both locally and in the cloud, ensuring that they are available when a disaster strikes.
Key Benefits:
- Scalability – Although other solutions are scalable, it usually requires the purchase of additional hardware or tapes. With Quorum’s cloud-based solution, it is simple to add additional databases without further capital expenditures.
- High Availability – Other recovery solutions take at least 24 hours to perform restore services. With Quorum, the hybrid appliance/cloud solution was built to be constantly running as a many-to-one failover server. If the primary servers are to fail, Quorum can be used as the replacement server, ready to operate within one minute.
- One-Touch Failover – In the past, Disaster Recovery plans included a tape backup system. Restoring a system involved obtaining the tape backup first. With Quorum, the backup system can be activated with the touch of a button ensuring that restores are measured in minutes, not days.
- HIPAA Compliance – At Quorum, we take compliance very seriously and developed our Disaster Recovery system to ensure that stored data meets all HIPAA requirements.
With electronic medical records, patient care needs to be as consistent in a disaster as it was with paper records. Quorum can help healthcare institutions provide this level of consistency with our scalable, high availability, HIPAA-compliant solution.
Legal:
Be prepared for the unexpected
Attorneys have to know all the angles of a case, and be prepared for any new revelation or bit of evidence that can come up. That’s their duty to their clients. But they may not be prepared for everything that can happen to a firm outside the courtroom. As any glance at the news will tell you, businesses, including law firms, are at the risk of data loss due to everything from natural disasters to malicious hackers.
Although advance planning cannot eliminate or prevent an unexpected event, it can give your law firm an edge in overcoming any long-term consequences like lost client information and damaged internal records that can be caused by a disaster.
Starting Points for Disaster Preparedness
For your practice, a Disaster Recovery plan should have two primary goals. First, it should be designed to protect crucial business records, including client contact information and case history. Second, the plan should provide a framework with the capability to quickly virtually replicate your office at a new location, if necessary.
Theoretically, most managing law partners understand the need for disaster preparedness but have found it difficult to formulate a plan. The main barriers to implementation have been the system support costs and the logistics of an offsite backup location. Fortunately, there are now options available that can address both recovery plan goals without the overhead costs and logistical nightmares.
Quorum – Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Quorum’s exclusive onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution, also known as DRaaS, provides a comprehensive way for law firms to design their recovery plan. With our solution, critical applications and data are stored in the cloud and can be quickly restored to any location.
Key Benefits:
- Complete Backup – Other Disaster Recovery solutions suggest that you should only backup key data. However, Quorum’s system is designed to ensure that you have a backup of all the vital records, systems, and databases. Since Quorum is a complete backup, the entire computer system and network can be restored at a different location.
- Regular Tests – Unlike other systems, Quorum has made a commitment to consistent testing. Quorum is designed to run a series of automated tests to ensure that backup data has not been corrupted and can be used in the event a restore is required.
- Easy to Install – Other solutions require weeks of planning and service provider costs before a tape system or redundant server is up and running. In contrast, Quorum’s intuitive design allows it to be setup and deployed within a few days. In addition, the most important business continuity functions can be activated with just the push of a button.
We do not know when a disaster will strike, but we can be prepared to respond when it does. With Quorum, you will have the assurance that your business will continue to happen regardless of the disasters that surround us.
Retail:
The word “disaster” usually refers to a catastrophic event wrought by mother nature. But in the retail industry, a disaster is actually anything that causes your store operations to be interrupted or stopped. Through this lens, an SQL or Exchange server going down and impacting inventory management is just as much a disaster as a flood or an earthquake that limits or prevents store operations. Recent studies have shown that the average revenue loss from an interruption for a small retail company is $6,900 an hour. Based on this, an 8-hour interruption to store operations because an employee inadvertently downloaded malware could cost up to $55,000 in lost revenue.
Proper Planning Can Prevent Business Interruptions
To avoid revenue loss and ensure uninterrupted customer service, retail companies need to prepare contingencies for all possible emergencies. An important component of those preparations should include a regular backup of all key business data.
Best practices suggest that a backup and restore policy need to follow some basic procedures. First, the backup should be performed on a regular basis. Next, the backup should be stored as far from the original data as possible but close enough that it can be restored in a short period of time. Last, the backup needs to be tested regularly to ensure that it is functioning correctly.
In addition, if a business retains credit card information, the backup needs to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards regarding the storage of customer information.
The Time is Now
The last few years have seen a lot of changes in Retail IT, especially around networking, communications, and cloud-based services. Quorum has worked with leading retailers across these changes to ensure that implementing a business continuity solution is low risk, low cost, and proven Quorum is proud to be a member of the National Retail Federation (NRF) Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). As part of NRF-ARTS, Quorum is working to ensure that cloud-based backup and disaster recovery fully meets the unique needs of retailers.
Quorum is the first DRaaS solution to be fully PCI certified
Quorum offers the flexibility of either a cloud-based solution (DRaaS), or hardware appliances that are managed by the retailer
Why Choose Quorum for Disaster Recovery Services?
Quorum’s exclusive onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution, also known as DRaaS, provides an easy and effective way for retail companies to continue store operations regardless of the size of the disaster. The system is designed to recover the most critical applications and data from the cloud after any storage, systems, or site failure.
Key Benefits:
- Regular Backups – Other solutions lock you out of the system while a backup is performed. With Quorum, backups run in the background and can be set to occur as frequently as 15 minutes or at the end of each day, without interrupting or slowing down your network and computer system.
- Offsite Storage – Most solutions will only move your data a few miles down the road which is still vulnerable to an area wide disaster. With Quorum, your data is stored securely far from your primary location in data centers located around the country.
- Fast Restores – A number of off-site solutions require at least a day to request and restore the data. With Quorum, the data can be restored within 1 minute, of a request, depending upon the size and type of data.
- Backup Testing – The majority of Disaster Recovery services store the data, but do not test it to determine whether a viable restore can be performed. At Quorum, data is automatically tested upon receipt for usability.
- PCI DSS Compliant – Quorum is the first and only cloud-based Disaster Recovery system to store data following PCI standards.
In a disaster situation, you can either act or be acted upon. With Quorum, your retail operations will be prepared to act in the event of a disaster as large as a flood or as small as an electrical outage.