The Catch With Cloud Backup

Wanted to share this article from Matt Carolan, one of Softchoice's cloud resources that has had great experience with the way organziations embrace the cloud. Backup is a big part of everyone's cloud roadmap, mainly because it looks to be a value driven solution that doesnt break the bank. Here are some of the insights he has on the direction of what he is seeing in the market.

-AG

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Everyone is talking about it. Those crazy cloud providers are working for nothing, running their businesses at a loss and getting closer and closer to the point where they are giving away free cloud storage. It’s not really that crazy. Enticing clients with free storage is a great play for cloud providers, as it’s now got to the point where, for a large percentage of business markets, it’s become irresponsible to not at least investigate using cloud storage for their business.

The cost alone is one point which convinced a client of mine recently to make the move to the cloud. They told me “I spend more each year on tape media alone than I will on cloud storage for backup.”

THERE IS MORE TO CLOUD STORAGE THAN JUST PRICE.

The price war makes high quality service affordable, which turns this into a win-win situation. Yes cloud providers are winning your business, but at the moment they are operating at cost price or a loss in order to make market share. So it’s a great time to be a business IT consumer because while this cloud war plays out, we get prices and quality of services that can’t be matched.

An easy foot in the door towards savings and experiencing the best the cloud has to offer is with backup. For as low as a penny a GB, you can have your files stored in Amazon AWS Glacier. For a little over two cents a GB you can have your backups stored in Microsoft Azure with two copies of every backup in two separate DC’s across the country of your choosing, and not pay anything extra for the second copy. Or for three cents a GB have three copies across three different DC’s with Amazon AWS S3. Not to mention files in each DC are also stored on a raid-style system to prevent a single DC from failing in the first place.

Ok, so if cloud storage is much better than the normal enterprise average storage, and it’s at a price point that any size business can afford, what’s the catch? It must be that it’s expensive to get your data off the cloud once you’re there, right? Not normally. You do get charged for data traffic out, but not in. So those uploads you’re sending from your backup software to the cloud every day costs nothing for the traffic. However the rare time you need to download for a restore you will pay, but it’s relatively a very small amount. Last week I was given the horrific example of how a vendor’s client was stung by a cloud provider with an $80k bill after restoring their backups. I dug a bit deeper as I didn’t want to be mis-leading clients about costs and see them get stung too. It turns out the vendors client was storing Petabytes in the cloud. Their monthly spend on storage was $500k. So when put into context $80k is not really that much especially since it was a one-off event.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY RAISE PRICES?

So we’re all getting hooked on cloud, what about when they start raising prices? No one can tell you that it will never happen, but I personally think it is extremely unlikely. Especially with all the competition around the cloud. I’m sure the price may hit a point where it flat lines, but the aim of these big cloud players is to have a massive number of customers and usage, and charge a small percent profit margin on that usage. It’s a numbers game. It’s a bulk purchase, resulting in low cost just like the grocery stores. “Argh” I hear you say, “but the big grocery stores squeeze the little guys out and then put their prices up.” My thoughts on that, is the cloud is a different beast. Unlike food which the human body can only consume so much of, IT demands from business grow all the time.

The cloud is based on its more sustainable monthly recurring revenue model with fantastic value, and a quality product. It’s like a runaway train, once it gets going is hard to stop.

So if you’re interested in the cloud or just keeping an eye on it for the moment, I look forward to helping you on your cloud journey some time in the next six years.

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ABOUT MATT CAROLAN

Matt has been helping companies move to the cloud since 2010 and with 15yrs under his belt in the traditional IT world he is able to relate to clients and their needs not just from the technical point of view.