Backup and recovery service Quorum raises $11M

Quorum helps small and medium sized businesses recover from hardware failure and downtime

Few things can set a company back quite as much as a hardware failure and downtime. The loss of data and time can cost a company thousands of dollars. Getting back online as quick as possible can mean the difference of a lot of money for companies that do not have much money to spare.

Quorum, a provider of one-click backup, recovery and continuity for small to mid-sized businesses, attempts to make the solution to hardware failure and downtime easy and cost effective and it has now raised $11 million in Series B funding to do just that, it was announced Monday. 

The round was led by new investor Toba Capital, an investment arm funded by the former CEO of Quest Software, Vinny Smith. Toba was joined by prior investors, including Airtek Capital Group. The company previously raised $5.3 million in Series A funding in November 2009 from investors previously associated with Sandpiper Networks, Tekelec, Ixia, and Orolia.

The money raised in the Series B round will be used to expand sales, marketing and support for Quorum's solutions, which the company says have seen “significant demand” over the past year. The funding will also be used to hire additional engineers to extend Quorum's product portfolio.

Quorum says that its hybrid cloud can help small to mid-sized businesses "avoid expensive downtime and recover from disaster in minutes, as opposed to days" by offering automatic and on-demand testing.

“Virtual computing makes spare platforms ready at a moment’s notice, rendering unacceptable the delays caused by the old backup-restore paradigm,”  it says on the company’s website.

“But raw virtual machines are only one ingredient of a rapid recovery plan. Assembling all the required ingredients, synchronizing constantly with the production environment, then triggering recovery in case of failure involved too much ongoing complexity to be practical for already overloaded IT professionals.”

So how important is quick recovery from downtime?

Quorum's recent Disaster Recovery Report found that most small to mid-sized companies experience at least one instance of downtime a year, and it is most often caused by hardware failure. It costs each business an estimated $74,000 for each hour that it is down. If Quorum can get a small business back online in just a few minutes, it will be able to save it thousands of dollars.

"Small to mid-sized businesses are beginning to look at business continuity differently, consequently moving from the old world of backup to tape, to a new world of recovery with the hybrid cloud," said Smith. "With its hybrid cloud solution, Quorum is leading the creation of a new category in disaster recovery. This was a driving reason behind the decision for Toba Capital to invest in the company."

Quorum could not be reached for further comment.

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