Quest Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:QSFT):

Organizations now operate in a world where employees and customers alike expect critical services to be available and accessible at all times, and it's forcing IT to rethink the way it approaches backup and recovery. According to the results of a new Quest Software survey of more than 200 IT professionals in North America, nearly three-quarters of organizations now rank restoring critical applications alongside recovering lost data as their top backup and recovery concern. Problematically, traditional data protection solutions require organizations to build recovery objectives based on servers and infrastructure, with little focus on the recoverability of the underlying applications that drive business activity. As a result, only 5 percent of organizations surveyed indicated that they build their recovery objectives strictly around applications.

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News Facts:

  • According to the survey, 73 percent of respondents indicated that restoring critical applications ranked alongside recovering lost data as their top data protection concern. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: F63-55D-786)
  • At the same time, however, only 5 percent of respondents indicated that they build their recovery objectives strictly around applications, while 78 percent indicated that applications play no role whatsoever in the formation of their organization's recovery objectives. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: F69-7B9-5FB)
  • Quest's survey also confirmed a number of additional trends driving increased emphasis on the rapid recoverability of critical applications and data, with 70 percent of respondents indicating that at least half of the data their organizations produce is considered mission-critical, and nearly one-third of respondents (32 percent) indicating that company management has specifically asked them to seek ways to reduce recovery times within the past year. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: B60-0EC-78B and BF9-384-EB6.)
  • Launched last month, Quest NetVault® Extended Architecture (NetVault XA) fills this recovery gap by enabling organizations to specifically focus on protecting the mission-critical applications that deliver services to end users.
    • With NetVault XA, administrators can organize, schedule, view, and manage backups based on the critical applications that power key business and technology services. This gives them the ability to set specific recovery time and recovery point objectives for each, regardless of whether those applications reside on- or off-premise, or in a physical or virtual environment, or a combination thereof.

Customer Perspectives and Supporting Quotes:

  • John O'Brien, founder and president, J.O'B Consultants
    "It's my job to ensure that our clients' mission-critical systems are protected at all times, and when it comes to backup, almost every organization I work with now has requirements to come up with faster recovery times than ever before. I tell them unequivocally that if you're concerned about meeting your recovery objectives, you better have a backup system that enables you to quickly restore your critical applications. Recovering the data alone simply isn't enough anymore. "
  • Ken Kearley, corporate applications manager, Florida College
    "Not only have end users become more and more dependent on the services that IT provides, but their expectations for availability and continuity are more demanding than ever before, as well. When a service goes down, today's end users expect it to be restored immediately, and it's imperative that we in IT can meet that expectation. That's why it's so important, especially when you're running a virtual environment, to have application-aware backup technology that enables you to not only drill down and perform fast, granular restores, but also to get those virtual applications back up and running quickly."
  • Greg Davoll, senior director, data protection product marketing, Quest Software
    "As this survey shows, there's a significant gap that exists between what organizations consider their top data protection priority - restoring critical applications - and the backup programs they actually put into place, most of which still require administrators to set recovery objectives based on data and servers, with little focus on the application's recovery time and service level agreement. Quest is bridging that gap with its recent announcement of NetVault® Extended Architecture, enabling IT to more easily manage backup, recovery and replication SLAs for their critical applications."

About the Survey:

  • Conducted in the second quarter of 2012 by TechValidate, a leading customer metrics and research organization, the survey polled a cross-section of 211 IT professionals that included executive-level decision makers such as chief technology officers and chief information officers, as well as a broad range of end users - including systems, network, and storage administrators - each of whom is responsible for managing certain aspects of their organizations' data protection programs. Companies ranging in size from SMB to Global 500 across all market segments participated in the survey.

Supporting Resources:

  • Quest Software, Inc.: http://www.quest.com/
  • NetVault Extended Architecture (NetVault XA): http://www.quest.com/netvault/netvault-extended-architecture.aspx
  • More Quest news: http://www.quest.com/newsroom/
  • Twitter: http://mobile.twitter.com/quest
  • Facebook: http://www.quest.com/facebook
  • LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/
  • Quest TV: http://www.quest.com/tv/

About Quest:

Established in 1987, Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) provides simple and innovative IT management solutions that enable more than 100,000 global customers to save time and money across physical and virtual environments. Quest products solve complex IT challenges ranging from database management, data protection, identity and access management, monitoring, user workspace management to Windows management.

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Quest, Quest Software, NetVault and the Quest logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Quest Software in the United States and certain other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Quest Software, Inc.
Scott Desiere, 949-754-8617
scott.desiere@quest.com