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A short look at the cost and cost cutting for online backup companies.

All online backup companies will have the standard fixed cost of any business and these are beyond the scope of this article so lets get to the beef.
An online backup company needs software. Few use their own at this stage because of the expert level which a small number of specialist online backup software suppliers. So broadly the will use one of the following.

Ahsay (Cheap and cheerful)
Venbu (Somewhat more advanced but not a perpetual licence offering)
remote-backup (Online backup pioneers)
Asigra (Most expensive option geared to implementations with many systems)

Now we see how their costs are affected by software, the next area is connectivity.
This used to be very much an economies of scale factor but increasingly the vast majority of providers will be using fibre and will have burst facility on their account so this shouldnt affect price too much unless the provider is very small and used dsl.

Next we look at infrastructure.
This area requires considerable initial investment if the provider wants to "own" their own facility. Alternatively they may use a third party. If this is the case you need to know all about the third party.

Next we look at archive. This area requires considerable once off and ongoing investment if the provider is going to offer reasonable to good retention periods for your data. Free and nearly free services will save considerable monies here by offering you terribly short retention periods. As low as 30 days is common despite not online backup defaults in the order of 1 to 7 years.

Next we look at support.
Substantial monies can be saved if support is by email only. This will not be much use if you are under pressure from your superiors to retrieve critical data.

Now you have had a brief lesson in the basic costs of online backup. You now know that free and nearly free services can not offer business level service and you know the areas they will save on and the consequence this could have on your business.
More importnatly you know which questions to ask and what answers to expect when selecting an online backup provider.

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