April 5, 2017

It’s always surprising how many teams are still suffering with a weak backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution. Sometimes leaders don’t upgrade because they think it’s not the most important area of their infrastructure; for them, buying other kinds of new tech is more fun, like buying a race car, while BDR is just the insurance to protect the car. These leaders feel that investing in one of the new advanced BDR solutions on the market isn’t the best use of their budget; that they’d rather spend on something flashier.

And that’s where their thinking makes a classic mistake: that better BDR is costlier BDR. In fact, upgrading to a faster and more advanced system can save IT teams money.

Don’t believe us? Let’s look at the ways an old system can drain your budget – and the ways an upgrade can save it.

The Money Pit

Deciding to “make do” with an old legacy system can feel noble, but it’s often financially misguided. Let’s start with the obvious: downtime. The longer it lasts, the more you’re paying your workforce to do nothing, the more transactions, sales and deals are lost, and the worse your brand looks. There’s also the matter of cyberattacks: get hit with Ransomware and any recovery delay will force you to choose between paying an exorbitant ransom or watching your files disappear for good. Then there’s the clean-up and the almost inevitable move toward new solutions anyhow.

But downtime isn’t the only drain on your budget. If you’re like a lot of teams, your BDR ecosystem probably consists of a number of solutions that have been stitched together. Most likely the performance is clumsy and unreliable, and managing basic administrative tasks eats up way too many hours. And if you’re depending strictly on secondary data centers, you’re facing ever-rising costs as your data expands. If you’re dealing with multiple vendors, you’ll spend untold resources managing them all and dealing with different support teams when something goes awry.

Saving Smarter

There are a variety of solutions and configurations to choose from when you upgrade your BDR system. Here are the traits that can save you money over time.

The cloud. Whether you choose DRaaS, hybrid cloud or another option, backing up to the cloud can help you reduce or eliminate datacenter costs. Capital expenditures become operational costs and you no longer need to pay to power, cool and maintain centers, travel to them, or manage the connectivity between systems. Your organization can expand regionally without a massive increase in your BDR budget.

Speed. Virtualized solutions give recovery an immediacy that once would have been impossible to believe. You can also enjoy faster data migration and backup creation, one-click failover, and faster replica performance. While this obviously saves your team time from an operational standpoint, it also prevents that downtime that leaves your company hemorrhaging sales and productivity. Your employees will keep working, your buyers will keep buying, and your reputation will stay intact.

Transparent pricing. If you’ve been through the BDR rodeo before, you know many solutions will have one price tag early in the discussion and then tack off hidden fees and additional costs for what you consider basic features. Suddenly your Total Cost of Ownership is very different from what you expected. Choose a solution that gives you an open quote that’s inclusive of what you want.

Unified, all-in-one solution. Dig beneath the surface of many vendors and you’ll find that you’re dealing with a number of sub-vendors. By dealing with just one vendor who does it all, you’ll only manage one relationship, one negotiation process, and one support team. Not only will you develop a stronger relationship that can lead to more advantageous terms, you’ll spend less time on vendor tasks.

Advanced technology. Some BDR solutions are still in the dark ages, with manual processes, and others have a foot in the future. You want appliances that can run failover workloads with no production workload disruption or performance drop, automated testing, advanced deduplication that can save on bandwidth requirements and other features that can speed up performance while minimizing resources.

When it comes to losing money on outdated tech, it’s usually a death of a thousand cuts. A better BDR solution can erase many of those ongoing costs and position you for a more profitable future in the end.