As organizations increasingly rely on SaaS solutions for business-critical applications, it’s becoming apparent that even the big providers eventually suffer outages. Recently, Microsoft customers suffered problems with Teams and Exchange Online. That follows an outage by Atlassian a couple months earlier. These SaaS apps are so ingrained in daily operations that they often contain the institutional knowledge critical to run the business. If you’ve ever experienced lack of access to files, messages, and other critical data, you probably are looking for a backup solution to ensure your business can keep running no matter what happens.
When evaluating a cloud backup provider, you’ll likely need to make a business case for the investment. Perhaps the solution’s features such as automated backup, high security, and an intuitive user experience look impressive, but how about the important question?
What’s the ROI? Can you provide a compelling business case to convince the stakeholders and leadership in your organization?
To understand the financial impact of backup and recovery solutions, let’s first evaluate the different costs involved.
What could be the financial impact of not backing up your cloud data?
1. Impacts of Cyberattacks
A study conducted by IT research firm ESG states that 79% of organizations had a ransomware attack within the past year. A devastating ransomware attack could leave employees unable to use core business applications for days, weeks, and even months at a time.
According to Forrester, a successful ransomware attack resulting in disruption to operations for an organization with 5,000 employees for five days would cost more than US$5 million. The same ESG study found that only 50% of the organizations were able to recover all their data in a clean and recent state.
According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations, large data breaches (with 100 million records or more) cost, an average of $5 million to $15.6 million and can top out at $200 million.
2. Accidental Deletions
According to ESG’s Tech Validation Report, accidental deletions result in data loss approximately 20% of the time. Verizon reports that 85% of breaches involve a human element. A single document sometimes is worth hundreds of dollars. A properly implemented cloud backup solution allows employees to restore critical data quickly and reliably, indirectly saving millions of dollars for the business.
3. SaaS Licensing Fees
Companies often must keep ex-employee user accounts active after their exit date to access user data which would otherwise be purged by the SaaS vendor. It is common for approximately 10% of employees to leave every year. This number can be much higher if organizations use a lot of temporary staff or contractors. The license fees to keep departed users active can be saved by using a cloud backup provider that retains your data for as long as you’re a customer.
4. Archiving Costs
Are you investing in data archiving repositories? Typically, organizations depend on separate archiving tools to help move inactive data into long-term storage systems. This helps optimize resources in the active system to help users quickly access data. By having a cloud backup provider – especially with unlimited storage & retention as Keepit offers – you can avoid investing in a separate archiving tool.
5. IT Administration Efficiencies
IT administrators typically spend a lot of time off-boarding employees and searching for documents that have been either intentionally or unintentionally deleted. If the time for off-boarding is reduced from an hour to a minute thanks to a backup solution, the net benefit would be thousands of dollars per year. Likewise, searching for hours to find deleted files is time-consuming and costly but with the right backup solution, IT admins can quickly search and find files in minutes.
A solid return on a critical investment
Keepit commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a total economic impact (TEI) study to evaluate the potential economic impact for businesses that utilize the company’s data protection services.
Based on interviews with five Keepit customers across a range of industries, Forrester generated a composite organization from which it produced a financial model that outlined three-year, risk-adjusted potential savings from utilizing Keepit. The TEI includes two categories of savings, quantifiable and unquantifiable. Forrester determined that in addition to unquantifiable savings like recovery from a ransomware attack, Keepit offers a 78% return on investment (ROI) and a net present value (NPV) of $225K. To see how a dedicated backup solution can pay for itself in just six months, download the full Forrester TEI study.
About Version 2
Version 2 is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Keepit
At Keepit, we believe in a digital future where all software is delivered as a service. Keepit’s mission is to protect data in the cloud Keepit is a software company specializing in Cloud-to-Cloud data backup and recovery. Deriving from +20 year experience in building best-in-class data protection and hosting services, Keepit is pioneering the way to secure and protect cloud data at scale.
