How to combat hidden costs in backup solutions

Hidden backup costs: integrated hardware appliances

We all know the concept of hidden costs. You work with a supplier or manufacturer, and it seems that their price is fully in line with your budget and everything is going smoothly.

You deploy the system and it works well at first. Then you encounter various limitations, and overcoming them requires more resources than you originally intended. The total cost of ownership (TCO) suddenly jumps to a completely different figure.

What happened? You overlooked hidden fees, solution limits, licensing costs, or a licensing model that you did not take into account. And the list is far from over.

Integrated hardware appliances – too good to be true?

Using a dedicated hardware system is one of the fastest ways to implement a backup or even multi-layered data protection solution in your organization. You get hardware, software, and sometimes even services in one neatly packaged bundle.

Installation is simple, configuration is intuitive, and suddenly your backup is working. Done! Or is it? Have you ever heard the saying, “it’s too good to be true”?

Unfortunately, in the case of backup appliances, this saying applies quite frequently – and the main weakness is scalability.

Your IT infrastructure, and with it your business, is dynamic. Your company grows, data volumes increase, and the IT infrastructure expands. The software part of a backup solution can be expanded easily, but hardware is more difficult. You will be limited by the existing capacity – whether it is the original 1 TB or 10 TB. So what are the options?

You can upgrade your appliance, which will significantly increase costs (2x or more) and require time for migration, reconfiguration, and project management.

Or you can implement another appliance, which will also increase costs (again 2x or more) and once again require time for migration, new configuration, and management – while also increasing the complexity of your infrastructure. Your IT team will now have to manage two appliances instead of one, while completely or partially losing the ability to manage them centrally.

While you may be impressed by the simplicity of backing up through integrated appliances, you may forget about scalability and flexibility, which will cost you more in the long run. Modern backup software can be easily scaled and tailored to a dynamically growing business, including the option to expand to simple backup storage such as NAS.

If you would like to learn more about avoiding the trap of limited backup capacities, find out more about Acronis Backup Advanced. It has no capacity limitations and allows you to use any new or existing disk or tape medium in any capacity and combination. The solution also offers deduplication.

Eliminate the risks of limited capacity and start working with an easy-to-use, comprehensive, and affordable solution. Visit Acronis for more details or download a trial version straight away.