The Difference Between Home and Business Online Backup Plans

Posted by Jim Van on September 16, 2011 under business continuity, data security, disaster recovery, security, small business | Be the First to Comment

The Difference Between Home and Business Online Backup Plans

I’m not sure about you, but my inbox is full of online backup offers for as low as $6/mo to backup up to 50gb of my data. Yipee! Just three years ago, the same amount of data backup would’ve cost me north of $75/month. Prices have really fallen. Or have they?

Let’s take a look at the $6 monthly plan, offered by Mozy backup (http://www.mozy.com):
m> data in a secure (256-bite encrypted) data center, with redundant backups at a couple of geographically diverse data centers using their automated software. You set the schedule, the backups take place. So far, so good.

Recently, SOS Online backup, a competitor to Mozy and a vendor of backup plans to companies like mine for resale to small business, conducted a few tests of Mozy and several other online backup services. The results were revealing:

1. When SOS tried to restore their entire backup of 14gb, the process took 3 days. Obviously, if you’re in business and need your data now, 3 days is not an option. This is one reason why this is a consumer offering and specifically not for business.
2. SOS performed 10 data restores from an equal number of backups, all approx. the same size (14gb). 37% of the restores failed, which is fairly consistent with industry figures. A 37% failure rate for restoration of critical business data, such as customer lists, transactions, etc is totally unacceptable.
3. While the process is automated, it’s also unmonitored, meaning that one simply assumes that the backup went ‘just tine’. Remember the old phrase: assume makes an ass of u and me?

The above describes the purchase of online data backup as a commodityservice makes sense for any number of reasons:

1. When purchased as a managed service, online backups are monitored, and daily reports are available (or should be).
2. The Service Level Agreement(SLA) that comes with such a service is much more extensive. For example, test restorations are generally guaranteed,depending on the level of service one purchases, on a weekly, bi-weekly or random basis. Some providers offer verification on a daily basis, although it’s generally very expensive to go this route. The bottom line is that your data is guaranteed to be backed up.
3. Your data is incrementally backed up, which means that when a file is changed on a subscribed system, it’s backed up immediately on a local machine, and generally uploaded within the hour to the online data vault. That means that you always have, at the worst, a near-real time backup of your data, and, if available from the local backup cache, a real-time copy.
4. Restores take hours using a file-system backup, minutes using a ‘bare-metal’ image backup. Most smaller companies use file-system backups, which cost significantly less than an image backup, which is a backup type developed for companies that absolutely, whether through regulatory or data dependency factors, require nearly immediate access to backed up data in the event of a loss.
5. File-system backups can be accessed remotely on a file-by-file basis. Handy when one needs to share, or obtain a backed up file, or only a partial restore is needed (most common).

Of course, with managed backups, the chief commodity is access to expertise. The company from whom you purchase online backup is generally a group of dedicated technologists who have a great deal of expertise in the backup process, including best practices in file and system selection. Even those companies who resell online backups (actually, most companies do) have a distinct value-add in this area.

So, how much does managed backup service cost compared to a consumer-type service? The answer really varies, and price shouldn’t be as much a factor as value. Think of your business revenues on an annual basis. Most online backup services charge a bit less than 1% of their customers’ average revenue. In general, pricing runs 3-6 times the cost of a consumer backup plan, depending on factors such as frequency of test restores, which can be labor-intensive, and other bells and whistles. Still, the prices keep dropping as the technology improves and the storage prices continue to plummet. But remember, it’s the value of the provider’s knowledge, and the implementation of best practices by the provider, that really drive the value of the offering.

The backup plan, offered to consumers, not businesses, covers up to 50gb of uncompressed