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.