Understanding Cloud Backup Costs in 2023
According to the latest 2023 Cloud Protection Trends Report, respondents expect to run 50% or more of their production workloads in hyperscale clouds such as AWS and Microsoft Azure by 2024[1]. It’s only natural to expect backup environments within these clouds to increase as well. With growing environments come growing costs. As a service provider, your clients expect you to keep cloud spend, budget and savings at the forefront of your cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS) implementation and design.
Cloud Backup Costs: The Need for Cloud Storage Optimization
This almost counts double when it comes to cost optimizing backup infrastructure. Your clients know they need backup, they just don’t want to pay a premium for it. Especially in the cloud. Plus, keeping cloud-spend down helps keep your margins high and contributes to longer customer retention.
Baas Cost Optimization: Strategies To Reduce Cloud Backup Costs
It’s important to keep cost optimization at the forefront to ensure a sustainable, long-term solution. Here are seven ways you can optimize your clients’ backup costs and maximize your BaaS revenue margins.
AWS Backup Solutions and Azure Backup Solutions: Reducing Cloud Backup Costs
One of the easiest ways to optimize backup costs in the public cloud is to use cloud-native backup solutions specific to AWS and Azure. These solutions are specifically designed for these cloud environments and enable faster recovery times by maintaining application and workload consistency. Leveraging a non-native backup solution means a higher possibility of unrecoverable data.
Leveraging Cloud Storage Tiers To Lower Cloud Backup Costs
Most public cloud providers offer different storage tiers with varying costs and performance characteristics. By leveraging these storage tiers, you can optimize backup costs by storing data in the most cost-effective tier for its level of importance. For example, you can store critical data in high-performance storage for fast recovery times and less critical data in lower-cost, cold storage such as S3 Glacier or Azure Blob Cold or Archive Tier.
AWS and Azure Instance Size Optimization
Optimize your AWS instances to use the appropriate size and type for your workloads. Use AWS EC2 instance size recommendations and rightsizing tools to find instances that are underutilized or overprovisioned. Azure Advisor is a built-in optimization tool that provides recommendations for optimizing resources in Azure environments. It can provide recommendations on instance sizing and resource efficiency.
Implementing Data Lifecycle Management Policies
Data lifecycle management policies help you manage data over time, including when to retain data and when to delete it. By implementing these policies, you can reduce the amount of data you need to store and backup, which can result in significant cost savings for your clients. For example, you can set policies to automatically delete data after a certain period of time or move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers such as Amazon Glacier. Azure Blob Storage lifecycle policies to automatically transition older backups to lower-cost storage tiers, such as Azure archive storage.
Data Compression and Deduplication: Impact on Cloud Backup Costs
Additionally, you can lower storage costs by making sure your chosen backup solution offers high-performance deduplication and data compression capabilities. Deduplication and compression reduce the amount of data transferred and stored. This can greatly reduce your storage and networking costs by requiring less space and bandwidth to move and store large volumes of data.
Using Built-in Cost Optimization Tools for AWS and Azure
AWS provides several tools to help optimize costs, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Budgets. Microsoft provides tools such as Azure Cost Analysis, Azure Cost Alerts and Azure Budgets. Use these tools to monitor and analyze your AWS usage, identify cost-saving opportunities, and set cost alerts to maximize budget and spending.
Choosing a Backup Vendor With Native Built-in Cost Calculators
Backup vendors that offer built–in cost calculators for AWS and Microsoft Azure can help you save money by providing insights into the cost of running your customers’ BaaS environment. The cost calculator takes into account various factors such as the number of instances, the size of backups, retention policy and storage location to provide an estimate of the cost of running backup in the cloud. Forecasting spending can save your customers from “bill shock” every month.
Conclusion: Optimizing Cloud Backup Costs With Veeam
Optimizing backup costs in the public cloud requires a strategic approach that considers cloud-native backup solutions, data lifecycle management policies and cloud storage tiers. By implementing these strategies, you can reduce backup costs while maintaining a reliable, scalable BaaS solution.
Consider using Veeam Backup for AWS or Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure as your public cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS) Offering. These solutions are designed to fit natively into your customers’ AWS and Azure environments and offer many of the cost optimization capabilities mentioned above that the competition doesn’t offer. Plus, Veeam offers flexible portability features allowing you to shift workloads across clouds or back to the data center. Centralize it all through Veeam Service Provider Console and you have a powerful solution to scale all your Veeam-powered Public Cloud BaaS offering quickly and efficiently. Together with Veeam become the trusted advisor your clients turn to when looking to optimize the cost of back up in the cloud.
[1] Source: 2023 Data Protection Trends Report