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.