Online Backup Services: Weighing Their Worth

Backup has become the bane of IT managers everywhere. In too many shops, the sheer volume of data needing backup has surged beyond the manageable, even as the amount of time and resources available to back it up have shriveled. At the same time, there's unprecedented pressure to make sure data is intact, searchable, and retrievable in any contingency be it a natural disaster or a manmade one.

Given all this, it's no wonder that online backup services are gaining in popularity – despite the fact that their return on investment can baffle the bean counters.

Indeed, research for this month's Byte and Switch Insider report hints that IT consumers aren't deeply concerned about paying more for online backup services than they would for in-house backup.

"The costs have come down over time," says one IT manager at a Texas law firm that's using services from LiveVault. Having replaced a tape backup system with the service, the firm saw its spending on backup actually rise. But, as this spokeswoman says, having a service guarantees that backups can be performed even if one of the data centers is out of commission. "There's nothing I don't like… In earlier years, we'd have been out of business if we lost telephones or a building. Today, we can lose both and still operate."

For companies that opt not to use services, the issue is more one of control and preference than cost. Paul Scheib, director of operations and chief information security officer at Children's Hospital Boston, says a service wouldn't meet his group's security and control requirements. Further, he's skeptical about the amount of bandwidth that may be needed to send large volumes of data to a remote provider's site. And he's not sure disaster recovery as a service would be more effective than retrieving data from off-site vaults."I couldn't see a service for any large environment," he says. Scheib recently publicized his group's choice of an in-house backup strategy based on products from Symantec and Veritas. (See Data Domain, Symantec Team.)

Despite reservations from users like Scheib, online backup services continue to attract consumers who are looking for backup help. A few have found a solution that weds the benefits of a service with the advantages of in-house control.

One of these is Chris Brown, applications system engineer at Colorado's Alpine Bank. While his group began as users of EVault's online backup service and liked the convenient interface, they decided it would be more economical to buy the software outright and avoid the service costs.

"We definitely paid more up front, but we will save in the long run," Brown says. While he calculates it will take three years for a return on investment in EVault's software, he notes that the bank no longer pays for storage by the gigabyte. Instead, the IT group can store as much as they like, while enjoying the same efficient interface that drew them to EVault in the first place. Furthermore, the bank maintains full control over its own data.

Did EVault give Alpine a tough time about opting only for their software? "They called and offered it to us!" Brown says. Apparently, the firm, which OEMs its software to a range of service providers, including InTechnology and IPR International, sees a range of alternative possibilities in the online backup market.Clearly, customers will need to get a handle on those possibilities as well, in order to make the most of online backup.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

The report, Online Backup: Making the Service Call, is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900. For more information, or to subscribe, please visit: www.byteandswitch.com/insider.

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