Four Tips for Optimizing Data Backup and Recovery Costs

The best data backup and disaster recovery strategy does more than just optimize an organization’s ability to restore operations quickly following a disruption. It also maximizes the bang that the business gets for its backup and recovery investments. 

Indeed, the costs associated with data backup and recovery continue to grow steadily because the volumes of information that organizations need to protect are also increasing in size. For that reason, getting ahead of inefficient spending in this domain is critical for businesses that want to mitigate the risks of severe outages while still spending IT dollars efficiently over the long term. 

But how, exactly, can companies square the circle between backup and recovery spending on the one hand and, on the other, protecting business continuity? That’s a complicated question to answer because there are many variables at play in backup and recovery cost optimization. But I’m here to provide some guidance, based on my extensive experience helping businesses design, implement and operate backup and disaster recovery strategies. 

Why Data Backup and Recovery Costs Can Be High 

A variety of factors can impact the cost of data backup and disaster recovery and make it challenging for businesses to optimize spending: 

• Massive data sets: The data that most businesses need to back up is large and getting larger. This is due not just to the tendency of organizations to produce more and more data over time, but also compliance and auditing mandates that require businesses to retain data for long periods, often, multiple years. As a result, organizations need to back up data in many cases, even if they are no longer actively using it. 

• Backup storage costs: Backup data tends to be large in size. Storing all of that data is often the most significant single contributor to high data protection spending. 

• Recovery infrastructure: To restore operations quickly following an outage, you need infrastructure to host your recovery environment. This can come at a high cost, especially if you keep a secondary infrastructure on standby at all times for disaster recovery purposes. 

• Tooling expenses: The software tools that businesses use to automate backup and recovery come with licensing costs. While these costs are typically relatively small compared to the expense of backup storage and recovery infrastructure, they still contribute to overall spending. 

• Management costs: Effective backup and recovery requires close oversight of operations to ensure that backups are created reliably and that they enable a successful recovery. This translates to staffing costs, which can be particularly high when backup and recovery operations are inefficient or poorly automated. 

Spending on resources like these is well worth it, of course, because it helps ensure that businesses can maintain business continuity following an outage, such as a cyberattack that disrupts IT services or an infrastructure failure. The cost of a large-scale, prolonged outage, which averages about $14,000 per minute as of 2024, is usually much higher than the cost of backup and recovery. 

Optimizing Backup and Recovery Spending 

But just because effective backup and recovery translates to lower costs stemming from outages doesn’t mean companies can ignore cost-ineffective backup and recovery spending. On the contrary, as I mentioned above, given the steady rate at which data volumes are increasing within most organizations, getting a handle on spending in this area is one critical step toward overall IT cost optimization. 

IDC has found that 64% of large organizations devote at least 10% of their total IT budgets to data protection, a figure that has increased more than threefold since 2019. Even if backup and recovery costs are not a significant part of your business’s overall IT spending at present, they’re likely to become more and more substantial over time. 

To reduce backup and recovery costs without compromising on the effectiveness of business continuity practices, consider the following strategies. 

1. Host backups on cost-effective cloud storage 

Perhaps the single most impactful step that the typical organization can take to reduce backup and recovery costs is to store backup data on low-cost cloud-based object storage services, like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. These services host data for pennies per gigabyte, which is usually much lower than the total cost of ownership of the storage infrastructure that businesses manage on-prem or in their data centers. 

Cloud storage also offers the benefit of storage capacity that is effectively unlimited. This simplifies operations because you don’t have to worry about running out of space and having to wait to purchase new servers, as you would when using self-managed backup storage infrastructure. 

A challenge of using cloud storage for backups is that it may take longer to recover because you have to move your backup data over the Internet (where bandwidth is limited) before you can restore it. But there are strategies for mitigating this pitfall, such as creating a recovery environment in the same cloud that hosts your backups. 

2. Leverage low-cost data storage classes 

You can get even more bang for your buck from cloud object storage when you take advantage of discount data storage classes or tiers, such as S3 Glacier. These provide cloud storage at the lowest possible cost. 

The caveat is that data may need to “thaw” before you can access it for recovery, a process that can take several hours. This could lead to delays in recovery operations. But for backup data that you’re not likely to access, such as older backups, the cost-savings benefits can outweigh the drawback of potential recovery delays. 

Conveniently, many backup vendors now offer features that can automatically cycle older or less critical backups into low-cost storage classes when appropriate, making it easy to take advantage of these storage options to cut your spending. 

3. Index backup data 

Indexing capabilities are another increasingly common type of backup tooling feature that can increase the value of your backups and minimize operational costs. Indexing keeps track of which data exists in your backups, which makes it easy to pull specific data from them later on. For instance, if you need to restore just one specific file because a user accidentally deleted it, you can look up the file in the index, then pull it out of your backups. This is much faster – and much less costly in terms of staffing time and resources – than having to mount backup images and search through them tediously to find the file you need. 

4. Outsource recovery infrastructure management 

As I noted, keeping a recovery infrastructure on standby at all times can be a tremendous expense. If the recovery environment is identical to your production environment, which it needs to be to guarantee effective recovery operations, maintaining it essentially doubles your total infrastructure spending. For every server or data volume that exists in production, you need a twin in the backup environment. 

To avoid these high costs, businesses can leverage third-party infrastructure to serve as a recovery environment. One way to do this is to plan to restore resources in a public cloud following an outage, so long as the cloud is appropriate for your organization’s security, compliance and performance needs. 

Alternatively, if you require a private data center or dedicated infrastructure, you can work with a managed recovery partner that provides recovery infrastructure as part of their offering. In addition to maintaining a recovery environment for you, managed recovery providers can also streamline the process of converting network settings, permissions and other important configuration details to fit the recovery environment – a process that can be complex and time-consuming because the settings in your original environment are typically not identical to those required in the recovery environment if the two environments are dissimilar. 

Conclusion: Raising Backup and Recovery Standards While Lowering Costs 

Backup and recovery are among the most crucial IT investments for businesses to make, given the central role that they play in protecting business continuity – and, by extension, protecting revenue and the business’s reputation against outage risks. But they can also be very expensive, especially when organizations overlook cost optimization opportunities. The good news is that by taking simple steps like choosing a cost-effective backup storage strategy and minimizing recovery infrastructure costs, you can protect your business without bloating your budget.