You’d think it would be easy to measure return on cloud backup and storage investments, but it might be a little more complicated than you think.

One of the issues some buyers fail to consider is that cloud backup and storage costs are cumulative. Think of it this way: If you back up a terabyte of newly created data each month but never delete anything, at the end of a year you’ll be paying monthly storage fees for 12TB of data, and 24TB a month at the end of two years.

Our , part of our Cloud backup IT project center, gives you other costs to consider. We run down your current costs, such as hardware, software, personnel and other expenses, and compare them to your projected cloud costs.

We also add a line for network and bandwidth costs. It’s one thing to back up your data to the cloud; it’s quite another to recover it in timely fashion when you really need it. So calculate your recovery time objective (RTO) and make sure you have adequate bandwidth and network capacity or other means to restore your data. You also need to research your data integrity and reliability needs to make sure they are met.

The cloud may be the way to go to protect your data. It can certainly give a small business or any company that lacks a secondary site an instant disaster recovery option. But as with any IT purchase, consider your requirements carefully and make sure they’re met.

Our cloud backup ROI calculator can be downloaded.

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