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.