Protect Data while Saving Cloud Costs — and the Planet
It’s no secret that IT leaders are leveraging public cloud resources on multiple fronts, and data protection is one of them. A study from The Futurum Group found that 80% of respondents utilize public cloud for data protection. You’re likely looking for ways to simplify operations. Integrating backup and recovery within your cloud environment is a big step toward that goal.
Environmental impact and sustainability are likely becoming important initiatives in your organization as well. Current estimates show that data centers are responsible for 2.5% of global emissions, larger than the aviation industry (and growing even faster).
The Challenge: Protect Data in the Public Cloud
Public-cloud services offer a convenient, consumption-based model. On the surface, they seem to offer cost savings. Charging by the terabyte creates an extremely low barrier to entry. And many offer free cloud-based services (like backup).
But these cloud-based services aren’t one size fits all. Every cloud vendor has a different pricing model, management console, and set of supported workloads. But the most significant limitation is that they work only in one cloud — the cloud service provider’s.
The irony is that these limitations increase the cost and complexity of the very environments that you’re trying to simplify. Managing multiple clouds, different interfaces, and surprise fees for “premium” functionality can make data protection total cost of ownership (TCO) spiral out of control. And having multiple solutions means increased vulnerability to ransomware and other threats.
What’s needed is a solution that provides visibility and centralized control of your data across your hybrid and multicloud reality. One that protects your business and your budget while doing its part to save the planet.
The Solution: Veritas Alta™ Data Protection
Veritas worked with The Futurum Group to develop a financial model to evaluate the TCO of data protection in the public cloud. The model compared the cost of using Veritas Alta Data Protection to protect AWS and Azure environments to their own specific offerings. It analyzed factors including hard costs, such as storage and compute infrastructure, and soft costs, such as administration and cyber resilience requirements.
The results were impressive, even to us. In their default scenario, Veritas provided an overall cost savings of 31% in Azure environments, and 81% in AWS environments. The savings were even greater in the largest environments – ranging in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars – over a seven-year period.
Key Advantages of Veritas
Reduced Storage Requirements: The most significant savings come from a dramatic reduction in storage costs. Veritas Alta Data Protection’s advanced deduplication and compression capabilities not only reduce storage requirements, but also retrieval fees. Depending on the environment, this alone can lower the overall solution cost by up to 70%.
Operational efficiency: Powered by Cloud Scale Technology, Veritas Alta Data Protection’s containerized, service-oriented, and elastic architecture expands and contracts cloud compute resources based on demand – allowing organizations to pay only for the resources when they use them. It also greatly simplifies capacity planning, deployment, and administration for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This supports lower infrastructure costs (a hard cost) and reduced administrative needs (a soft cost).
Cyber resilience: An effective cyber resilience strategy can lower several soft costs. The financial impact of downtime varies widely, but lost revenue, regulatory fines, and the potential of increased insurance premiums affect all organizations. Faster recovery — reducing the need for costly clustering — combined with built-in anomaly detection, malware scanning, and integrated recovery testing lower risk mitigation costs.
Environmental sustainability: With data centers representing a rapidly growing percentage of the global carbon footprint, Veritas Alta Data Protection’s optimized storage and elastic compute capabilities ensure alignment with your organization’s environmental initiatives. The study found a reduction of carbon emissions by up to 84% compared to native cloud services.
Veritas Alta Data Protection can reduce the environmental impact of cloud backup and provide significant cost savings compared to native AWS and Azure tools. Designed from the start to provide secure, efficient data protection across multiple clouds, Veritas addresses the challenges of modern enterprises — and it helps us save the planet along the way.
Next Steps
Explore the TCO Analysis Tool to see how much you can improve the efficiency and sustainability of your cloud data protection strategy. Learn more about The Futurum Group’s analysis in the accompanying white paper.
