It is an exercise that every company in the Western world engages in every year: the eternal search for cutting costs. Since data storage and backup tends to be an area that so few people understand, it is often overlooked as a possible money saving source. The reality is that many companies spend way too much on data backup because they are slow to update their methods and they don’t take into consideration all of the elements involved to reflect total cost of ownership. Here are just a few ways technology is helping companies everywhere save money, while improving restore time objectives, minimizing risk and ensuring compliance.

Two Winning Strategies

Duplicate data is a problem. Old, useless data is a problem. Solve both of them by utilizing data de-duplication technology and establish a data retention plan. Both of these methods will help to save you money in different ways. First, data de-duplication is the process of using markers that point to duplicated data instead of simply backing up everything over and over again. This advanced system of data storage can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes your company to back up all of their data each and every day – and more importantly – reduce the amount of time to restore the data when it is needed. By recording data once and then using a simple marker system that points to that one piece of information instead of recording it again, your total backup and restore windows can be reduced significantly – not to mention the amount of storage required to house that data.

Data retention plans are not new...we all know the IRS requires us to keep certain data for a specific amount of time in order to prove our innocence, should we ever get audited. In business, it’s different.  Different types of data have different values and different compliance concerns associated. A data retention plan, if implemented correctly, should place a value on different types and classifications of data, allowing a company to align the backup and restore processes with those classifications.  This process ensures the data that is the most critical to the operation of your business is highly protected and readily available, while old, useless data is either purged from the system or stored on less expensive media, such as tape or slow disk.  This alone can provide a significant cost savings relative to backup and recovery tools.  

Block By Block

In addition to the data retention policies, block-level backups can save even more time and money. A block-level backup is different than a file-level backup because it only backs up information that is new and information that has changed. For instance, let’s say you have opened up a 100 page document and made a change on page 43...traditional backup systems will see that as a new file and back up the entire file.  Block-level backup systems will only store the small blocks of data that make up the change, greatly reducing the amount of space required to protect both document versions.  The result is a greatly reduced backup window, faster restore times and lower data storage costs.

If there is one universal truth in today’s business world, it is that everyone is looking for ways to reduce costs. Many people fail to examine their data handling processes as a potential cost cutting target – or they examine it and aren’t diving in deep enough.  The reality is that data backup and recovery total cost of ownership is often significantly more than people think. Here are four sure fire tips your company can implement to help significantly reduce your data related costs.

Define critical and important data

Regardless of the age of your business, you likely have far more data lying around then you need. When you perform your data backups, a significant portion of that data doesn’t need to be saved because it has no value to the business, which means you are throwing away time and money. The first step is defining what business value different categories of data provide. In other words, what do you absolutely need, what would be nice to have and what wouldn’t matter at all in the event of a system failure or disaster. Admittedly, this isn’t an easy task for most companies and very few do it well, but if you can get your arms around this concept, there are a number of opportunities for cost savings and operational improvements. Define categories such as critical, important, sensitive, valuable and low value – note that you may want certain data to belong to more than one category...certain client data, for example, may be low value, but it could also be sensitive due to a confidentially obligation.  Critical data is the data that your company can’t operate without or data that is subject to certain laws or regulations. If everything crashed tomorrow, what information would you need - and how fast would you need it - to get up and running again.  Once you have your data dropped into these buckets, assign separate expiration dates to the different categories and define restore time objectives.  A restore time objective is usually measured in hours and it reflects how long you would be willing to wait before getting the data back in the event of a data loss or a disaster.

Automate your data retention policy

Simply categorizing data by itself doesn’t do much to cut costs – you now have to apply the retention policy, which can be an arduous task without some technology to automate the process. By implementing a data retention policy and automating the process, you are basically pruning your data and reducing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and restored. Lower data volumes mean less storage and lower restore time objectives, which both translate into lower overall costs.

Implement data de-duplication technology

The next area to examine is data de-duplication. Using technologies such as block-level backup and data storage, duplicate data can be identified and only be backed up and stored once.  If you’re backing up 10 Windows servers, do you really need 10 copies of the operating system? Instead of backing up duplicate data, this approach identifies redundant information and simply places a marker that points to the original data wherever duplicate information appears. This means that no single piece of information gets copied more than once. Your storage costs are reduced, your restore time objectives are easier to hit and your company saves money. If your current data backup solution doesn’t offer data de-duplication, look for a company that does.

Centralize administration of remote locations

A shocking portion of the costs for some companies comes from administration costs at remote locations. If you’re an organization with IT operations in multiple places, chances are you had two choices when determining how to backup data and systems in each place – you either put in massive amounts of communications bandwidth or you put a tape backup system at each location. Problem is, neither of those solutions make sense considering technologies available today.  The cost of implementing, administering, upgrading and monitoring multiple systems can get out of control quickly.  I know of one company that had 23 small locations within about a 150 mile radius – they had a full time person that was responsible for rotating tapes, all they did was drive location to location every day – true story. A solid backup solution should allow for multi-site management through a single central location...including the process of getting the data offsite.  

There are some areas in which a company can simply make cuts blindly and other areas in which cuts need to be done with surgical precision. Reducing data backup costs is important, but if you aren’t careful, you may end up doing more harm than good.

The entire technology industry evolves at an incredible pace. What was once state of the art quickly becomes yesterday’s news at an almost shocking rate. If your business backs up all of their data to an off-site location or has engaged in any type of strategic planning around data storage, you may have heard of data de-duplication. This process, which changes the way that data is stored has been getting a lot of attention lately and it is fast becoming the industry norm. Before you jump on the data de-duplication bandwagon, however, it is important that you understand how the process works and how it impacts all data management processes, especially backup and recovery.

Simply put, data de-duplication decreases the total amount of data by examining the building blocks that make up individual files and comparing them to an index of previously stored data – if the data is recognized, then a marker or pointer is inserted to the original block of data rather the actual data.  The result can be a significant decrease in total data storage and a cascade of ancillary benefits such as decreased backup and recovery windows and better overall storage utilization. Let’s look at some benefits you can take from data de-duplication.

Cost
Because you are now able to store all of your data within significantly less space than before, you flat-out need less space – less hardware is a good thing, right?

Efficiency
Because you are moving less data back and forth from backups to restores and back again, the process is significantly more efficient. You aren’t wasting time backing up the same data over and over again, so your servers spend less time being down and inaccessible and you can get more work done, either remotely or in your office. As they say, time truly is money and with more efficient backup systems in place, your business can do more business.

Speed
Less data means less time to complete familiar tasks, which means that the total backup and restore times are significantly reduced. And productivity is significantly increased.

Bandwidth
Less data means less bandwidth to complete the same process in the same amount of time.  Less pressure on the network means you can meaningfully plan network capacity requirements and right-size the infrastructure.  Before, you were required to managed to the highest denominator – often backup and restore processes.

Time
While all of these benefits are clearly interrelated, time is often the driving reason to consider de-duplication.  Assuming you keep the same infrastructure, same bandwidth and same number of tasks, benefits manifest themselves in decreased time for data processing.  More aggressive restore time objectives, smaller backup windows – more time to do more productive things.

It is no secret that the world of technology changes at lightning speed. Just as you seem to master one operating system, one form of media or one backup and recovery technique, a new one comes along that is supposed to be better, faster, and cheaper.  But new technology means new learning curves, new processes and new challenges. For many businesses out there, tape backups have been a way of life. However, significant advancements in the world of data storage, backup and recovery have rendered tape backups an endangered species. Let’s look at just a few of the ways in which tape backups are on the way out.

Speed

While there are many variables that factor into the speed of a backup and recovery operation, the most notorious are those tape drives. While tape drives were once state of the art and allowed for an incredible amount of data to be stored, those days are long over. Sure, advancements have been and continue to be made in the areas of tape backup – but we’re really just postponing the inevitable.  Just as no one uses floppy disks any longer, tape drives should be considered the snails of the computer world. If you are attempting to back up your entire system every night, you likely have a dedicated backup window that is much of the night. Thankfully, you don’t have to any more. With off-site backups that use secure internet connections and block-level delta processing, you can condense backup windows significantly. When you switch from tape backups, provided you select the appropriate disk-based technology, you gain hours in productivity from improving both backup and restore times.

Capacity

It truly is amazing how much larger our data storage requirements are today than they were just five years ago. Larger data storage requirements mean larger backup and recovery capacities. Tapes were once thought to be an incredibly accommodating form of backup, but by today’s advanced standards, they simply don’t cut it. Many businesses that rely on tape backups often have offsite storage facilities – or they should. Mishandle one and your entire organization can come crashing down. By using a more advanced form of data backup and recovery, space simply becomes a planning exercise to ensure you have enough disk space.  How many times in the last 10 years have you had to upgrade to a new tape format for capacity reasons? And guess what...you now have to either migrate the old data to the new tape format or keep the old drives around – that sounds like fun. Not to mention the media costs alone...if you’re using a best-practice-based tape rotation schedule, those just keep adding up. It can be a difficult transition for some companies to move from an older way of backing up data, but tapes are simply not a good long-term strategy.

Recovery

Isn’t the entire purpose of data backup to ensure you are able to restore?  99% of all restores are non-disaster related. Meaning, something much more basic happened – user error being the leading cause, hardware failure coming in at a distant 2nd.   With most tape systems, you have to get your hands on the appropriate tape(s), drop them into the drives and you might even have to let the system read the index before you can even begin the restore process.  With new, more advanced remote backup solutions this same process is kicked off with about 3 clicks, and individual files, folders and even complete systems can be restored in a fraction of the time.  Think about that...how long do your users have to wait for a single file restore if the tape is already offsite?  If you add up the time they waste waiting, the time it takes IT to deal with the restore request and the time it takes to actually do the restore, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand the productivity issues associated with tape recovery. You owe it to yourself and to your company to provide the best data backup and restore capabilities possible – if you haven’t considered an offsite backup solution, you’re not delivering.

 

Leon Thomas is the CEO of Jelecos, a proven provider of best-in-class data backup and recovery solutions. For more information about how to make the switch from tape drives to better backup solutions, visit Jelecos Data Vault.

You've heard the sales pitches for offsite data backup before, but are there really concrete reasons for you to pay good money for someone else to handle your organization's data? Certainly every organization’s backup and data protection needs are different, but here are three that the CTO should know about.

1. Data storage is difficult

Storing last month's accounting data might not be a problem, but cost effectively storing all user data for dozens of departments or locations for a five to seven year period can present numerous challenges. Most companies are forced handle significant amounts of data and deal with year over year data storage growth requirements of 25% or more. Keeping all that data on your company's own infrastructure can become resource intensive. Storage media, engineering time, adequate hardware – all of those cost money, and we haven’t even discussed lost productivity issues when a restore request takes 12 to 24 hours to fulfil.

Remote data backup, meanwhile, is becoming a contender when compared to legacy solutions. In many cases, it proves more cost effective simply by considering the hardware, software and media components of the data storage cost equation.  Most backup service providers provide scalable solutions that allow capacity to grow as you need it instead of your IT department trying to guess what storage needs will be in 3 years by throwing a dart at a board (with their eyes closed).

At the same time, remote data backup providers will often give your data an extra layer of protection of three point data replication that your company would probably find hard to cost justify. Your data should be protected by a SAS 70 Type II audited storage facility with continuous power, and that knowledge alone can provide value in peace of mind.

2. Security is complicated

While data such as that email forward you received from your aunt is relatively invaluable, there are also certain groups of information – employee records, for example – that must be kept secure and confidential. Some of this data may be accessed by particular people, but definitely isn't for the eyes of majority of the organization. Compliance standards carefully set these standards and you need to be able to prove you are following them.  Many remote backup service providers have tools to facilitate compliance in this arena.

On-site storage can present challenges in this area unless you have significant security policies and in place and a secure environment for your technology to reside. In addition, on site data is subject to the risks of breach or destruction by that maligned employee (not that it would happen in your company, of course).

Offsite data backup helps mitigate this risk by storing all your important data at a location that's literally hundreds of miles away in an encrypted state. To further increase security, your CTO can choose to give just a select group of people the access approval, which can easily be audited. Meanwhile, the remote backup provider adds its own security measures to the data that you send, making unauthorized access risks very low in a well-ran provider environment. 

3. Working with a provider improves efficiency

Companies often backup the same data multiple times. Tell me again why we thought it was a good idea to do weekly backups of everything we own if we didn’t change it since the last time it was backed up? Oh yeah, then repeat the process monthly? Think of how much space that picture of the 46 pound cat you received in 2001 via an email forward is taking up…good thing you can restore than if you need to.  Or can you?  The reason we all were conditioned to think repeat backups were a good deal is simple…tapes fail at alarming rates. So, in other words, you’d better have a backup to your backup that you’re backing up. Sounds expensive to me. I’d be surprised if your organization isn’t guilty of this too. Whether it's input from different departments or outdated data that's not disposed properly, all that extra data consumes additional resources, takes longer to backup, longer to restore – all of which chip away at your bottom line.

Most off site data backup providers offer to process the data you send to eliminate redundancies using advanced deduplication techniques in order to minimize storage requirements – or at least the good ones do. When you want to access your data again, you get a much more streamlined process that takes less time and resources.

Yes, remote backup for your company's data will cost your organization money, but in many cases, it’s probably less than you’re paying now.