Our most recent Cloud Data Protection blogs covered some of the functional benefits of moving to the cloud, particularly concerning data risks and malware threats. Combining the security capabilities of first-tier cloud service providers with a sophisticated cloud-native SaaS app minimizes attack vectors as well as speeds recovery times. But there’s another benefit everyone will understand: lower costs. This blog shows how.
It’s fairly simple: cloud data protection can save your enterprise a lot of money. Here are a few of the ways:
Eliminating on-premises infrastructure and IT overhead is critical
To accurately calculate the costs of using and maintaining an IT investment over time (TCO), you have to combine both direct and indirect expenses. Hardware, software, operations, and administration costs are usually easier to quantify, you know exactly how much you paid for infrastructure and you can track IT time spent on various tasks. But figuring out indirect costs is trickier. Research suggests that initial hardware investments typically represent a fraction of their TCO. To see why, visit our TCO calculator if only to see all the costs you may not have thought of. The missing percentage is all the technical support, maintenance, and other labor costs over time.
Mitigating ransomware with cloud-native backups can save millions
Every year, enterprises worldwide lose billions of dollars worth of data and lost productivity to ransomware. According to a recent report by Aberdeen Research, a company with 1,000 workers, each with a laptop, handling collectively 10TB of data, is likely to lose nearly $500K from a successful ransomware attack. And there’s a 10% chance it’ll lose more than $2.5M.
However, after setting up a cloud backup and restore solution, the likely loss goes down to about $54K. And the loss from a 10% worst-case attack goes down to $200K. That means a solution that lets you easily back-up all your enterprise data in the cloud, and restore it quickly, can reduce the impact of a ransomware attack by more than 90%.
There’s also a hidden benefit to automatically backing up data to the cloud. A comprehensive process requires monitoring virtually all of an enterprise’s data files. This means a solution can detect odd changes (anomalies) such as mass renaming, deleting, and encrypting that are warning signs of a malware attack. It can then alert IT to help minimize losses.
Not all your data needs four-nines availability
You have enterprise data that you simply can’t do without and if it’s lost for any reason, you need it restored immediately. You also have data, such as archived legal content for eDiscovery, that you must have access to but not necessarily right away. Because cloud storage offers different pricing for different availability, there’s no reason to store both types of data in the same place. Furthermore, you frequently access some data and you infrequently access other content. Again, cloud storage offers different pricing for different access rates and you can store your data appropriately.
A SaaS data protection solution can automatically sort hot (frequently accessed requiring high availability), warm (less-frequently accessed data), and cold (rarely accessed data requiring low availability) data and store it where it belongs, significantly reducing costs.
Druva maximizes your savings in several ways, including pay-as-you-go pricing, anomaly detection to minimize ransomware losses, and automatic storage tiering to optimize service-provider fees. It is a flexible, cloud-native solution that offers cloud backup and disaster recovery across endpoints, data center, and cloud workloads — without requiring any dedicated hardware, software, or skilled resources. And Druva Cloud Platform is built on AWS, making it secure, infinitely scalable, and globally accessible.
Our previous blogs in this series include:
- Why enterprises are turning to the cloud for data protection
- Satisfy your business needs with the right cloud-only strategy
- Enhance your cloud data protection with rich metadata
- Stay ahead of malware with cloud data protection
The last one will be up soon, it will discuss how a cloud data protection platform can enable big data analytics and enhance eDiscovery and compliance.
For more detail about why the cloud is the place for enterprise data protection and management, download the Cloud Data Protection for Dummies book and our ClO’s Guide to Cloud-first Data Protection.