Don't Renew Your Data Protection Solution Without a TCO

When considering the best backup solution for workloads in data centers and remote offices, organizations need to carefully evaluate their decision criteria and cost models to achieve the best outcomes for their business.

A dependable cost model takes into consideration not just hard costs like hardware, software, and cloud capacity, but also supporting costs such as current data center investment, administration time, networking requirements, security, and long-term growth footprint. License renewal is an excellent opportunity to reevaluate the real ROI of your data security solution.?

Some data security solutions are old and complex, cost a lot of money, and require a lot of resources and manpower. For example, what was great about Veeam 10-15 years ago, a server-based approach for emerging VMware usage, has now become a model of the past.?

However, SaaS has continued to make huge technology advancements, making it the de facto standard for data protection in modernized IT environments. Organizations today can and should look at a leading SaaS backup provider, like Druva as part of any IT modernization and cost reduction effort. Even for a small organization, the cost savings can amount to thousands of dollars resulting in high ROI.??

This issue of Data Security Frontline will explain the components of both the legacy and the modern approaches to data security so it’s easy for you to identify the additional components that are required for a legacy data security solution. We will also help you uncover the real cost of the data security solution you are currently using with the help of our TCO calculator.

Legacy Ways of Securing Data

Even in the age of scalable on-demand cloud platforms, several data protection and security solutions continue to use several types of hardware resources to back up data. Legacy data protection solutions were not built for the cloud; they’ve just modified existing on-premises technology and architecture to support the cloud.

Veeam is an excellent example of how on-premises software and hardware solutions can’t match the scale, simplicity, and cost efficiency of SaaS.

Here’s a quick look at all the things that organizations need to spend on if they are using Veeam to protect their data:

Let’s understand these areas in slightly more detail.?

1. Solution management - Traditional backup environments are complex with many pieces coming together. They require a significant amount of time to monitor and manage. A typical deployment requires you to manage several things like: initial and ongoing setup and configuration, multiple backup services, storage, software updating, patches, and hotfix administration.
2. Security software and operations - To properly secure a backup environment, at a minimum, anti-malware/virus, and security operations management must be included. Additionally, Veeam is dependent on 3rd party storage to provide immutability. This implies that you incur the following costs at a minimum: 1. Additional storage for immutability, 2.?Periodic security audits to ensure the safety of the on-premises environment, 3. Continuous monitoring to ensure fast response in case of a cyber attack.
3. Cloud services - Organizations that want to use cloud (AWS S3, Azure Storage) can either use their own contracted cloud storage or use Veeam’s Cloud Connect capabilities via one of their providers. Both options will entail ingress and egress fees, and API costs, and will introduce deduplication inefficiencies that will increase storage costs. ?
4. Hardware and data center - This category represents the largest of the costs, which will vary from one organization to the next based on existing infrastructure, size of VMs, and if a single-site or multiple sites are involved. However, a medium size 100TB environment will include the following expenses: 1. Local storage - This represents the largest cost item.?2. Server hardware and networking - Veeam best practices require at least 9 servers. 3. Software licenses - Veeam requires a Microsoft Windows Server environment. More servers means you have to spend more on licenses.?4. Data center space allocation - Although this is usually a nominal cost, space allocation needs to be considered given the 9 server recommendation for this deployment.
5. Software and services - A wide range of hardware components requires several paid and free softwares. However, you must also take into account the cost of managing, updating, and upgrading each software.??

The above costs might seem totally valid and plausible considering your idea is to deploy a technical solution to secure an important business asset. However, you will soon see that you can get much better data security without spending such a huge sum of money.

Modern Data Security

New-age data security solutions are dynamic. They can scale up or down as per your requirements. There’s no hardware to deploy, no wasted storage, and no hidden costs from maintenance, upgrades, or facilities fees.?

Druva is a great example of a modern data security solution. With Druva you get a secure, simple solution that can be deployed in 15 minutes with near-zero administrative overhead. This will enable you to lower your costs and give your IT team time to focus on higher-priority projects.

Druva requires organizations to spend on very few things listed below.

1. Solution management - Druva uses a single platform and UI across all its products and offerings. This enables anyone to configure, automate, and manage data security without devoting much time. Anyone in IT can use the solution without special training.
2. Software and services - This represents the bulk of the spend for a SaaS solution like Druva. SaaS pricing is transparent and consumption-based. You can start small (and for free with our free trial) without any future commitments and can expand as per your requirements.?

Yes! That’s it. With #Druva you just have to take care of two things and you also get cloud-native disaster recovery to get your business up and running within minutes.

Data Security Solution Ownership Cost Comparison Summary

We have summarized the information above into the following table so that you can visualize that modern solutions like Druva require far fewer components than age-old solutions like Veeam.?

Pie-chart view of spends

Calculate Your Data Security Cost Using Druva’s TCO Calculator

Now you know that choosing the right data security solution can help your organization save up to 40%. To calculate the true spend that you are making to keep the data secure for your environment, visit our TCO calculator page. The TCO calculator takes you through a short questionnaire to collect information about the tech environment configuration of your organization.?

Carefully go through each question in the TCO calculator and try to enter accurate details. Once you complete the questionnaire, you will be able to download a full report that explains how much money your organization can save if they switch their existing legacy data solution provider with Druva.