For IT decision-makers, the public cloud has become a game-changer. Scalability, agility, and elasticity are just a few of the many benefits that have driven more organizations to adopt public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
But with cyber threats on the rise, ensuring business-critical cloud data is protected and rapidly recoverable while optimizing cloud costs can feel like a difficult balancing act.
Cloud-native backup solutions are often the default answer, as they offer the convenience of being built-in and easily accessible. While these cloud-native backup solutions provide fundamental backup and recovery functionality, they often lack advanced features to help you optimize cloud costs, increase cloud storage efficiency, and minimize the risk of ever-evolving ransomware attacks—all helping to lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
But cloud-native backup solutions often fall short of what's required for a modern, cloud-based enterprise. Cloud-native backup lacks lacks the ability to control unstructured data growth (including redundant, obsolete, or trivial data) and is missing critical data tier oversight capabilities. Cloud-native backup also often lacks the enhanced security features that reduce downtime.
In short, cloud-native backup cannot ensure that your cloud investment truly delivers on its promise of cost-effectiveness. So how do you know if you are paying too much for your cloud-native backup?
The Benefits of Third-Party Backup
A third-party solution can often address the limitations inherent in cloud-native backup. Here are five ways to optimize your cloud backup TCO to make sure you are getting the biggest bang for your backup bucks:
Monitor data growth, storage bloat, and ROT data: Cloud workloads (especially cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage) often exhibit rapid unstructured data growth. A considerable amount of this data is often redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data. Cloud-native backup solutions are unable to provide you with the key data insights to monitor this class of data—and if left unchecked, your cloud storage footprint will grow exponentially, costing you more each day to maintain. An enterprise-grade data protection solution like Rubrik can help you manage this extraneous data.
Reconcile to lower-cost data tiers: Storing all data on hot, tier 1 cloud storage options like Amazon S3 Standard and Azure Blob Hot can give you quick access to your data. But is also very costly. This is especially true for data that needs to be retained long-term for compliance reasons. Cloud-native backup solutions are unable to provide direct write to lower-tier storage such as Amazon S3 IA or Azure Blob Cool. This means infrequently accessed data is required to be stored in tier 1 storage before being tiered off, increasing your cloud costs. An enterprise-grade data protection can help you to move this data to a lower-cost, cold storage location.
Protect against ransomware exposure: Cloud-native backup solutions can lack enhanced security features that bolster your security posture. This can lead to greater exposure to ransomware attacks, increasing the duration and cost of recovery. Advanced security features such as anomaly detection, threat monitoring, and sensitive data discovery help organizations understand if, how, and where an attack is happening.
Reduce operational overhead: Managing daily backup and recovery tasks with a cloud-native backup solution, often through command lines or basic UIs, is time-consuming and prone to human error. This manual approach can strain your IT team, diverting valuable resources from more strategic initiatives. Furthermore, ensuring consistent data protection across a complex, multi-cloud environment becomes challenging when relying on multiple cloud-native tools. This can lead to inconsistencies in backup schedules, missed backups, and difficulties in recovering data from various cloud providers, increasing the risk of data loss and service disruptions.
Shorten recovery times: Cloud-native backup solutions often lack the advanced features that minimize downtime. Features like robust content search, granular recovery capabilities (like recovering individual VMs or files), and automation are frequently limited. Without these features, you may struggle to quickly locate and recover specific data when needed, potentially leading to extended downtime, increased operational costs, and difficulty meeting compliance requirements. An enterprise-grade data protection like Rubrik can help you recover faster.
Ready to Learn More?
Rubrik has the tools you need to optimize your cloud TCO and ensure comprehensive data protection for your AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud workloads.
Watch this demo and see how a trusted third-party solution can secure your cloud backups at a lower cost.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this document are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in our sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of Rubrik, Inc. and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.