Controlling Costs of Cloud Backup Services

Cloud backup services can provide several valuable cost-efficiencies for backup and storage of enterprise data, but if you move forward with a solution before doing your due diligence, you could be met with a slew of unexpected costs. Many cloud backup vendors have confusing and complicated pricing models that make it difficult to predict the total cost of ownership (TCO) on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, and hidden costs can cause your cloud backup bills to fluctuate wildly. While it’s best to choose a backup solution with transparent pricing and an easy-to-understand cost model, it’s important to understand what those unpredictable costs generally are. Here are the three biggest contributors to cloud backup cost fluctuations.

Examples of hidden and fluctuating cloud backup costs

Egress Fees

The majority of cloud providers will allow their users to place data into the cloud without any fees. However, this does not apply when their data is retrieved from the cloud. Cloud providers typically charge what’s known as egress fees any time data is retrieved.

If your enterprise is constantly pulling its data out of the cloud—such as migrating or recovering data— you can see how the fees can add up quickly and lead to inflated costs that are nearly impossible to predict. Egress fees are considered a hidden fee since they fluctuate based on usage and are tied to a common action (data retrieval).

Licenses

There may be a variety of licenses that are required, each with their own fee. These can snowball when cloud backup vendors require licenses for each of the data sources you back up or multiple licenses per user—something you may not realize until the bill comes.

Snapshots and Storage Costs

It is common for enterprises to create long-term storage for their production data if they need to recover it after an attack—such as ransomware. This could involve creating massive amounts of snapshots for each account in high-tier storage. Furthermore, each time a block or file is changed, a new snapshot is automatically created. These snapshots are replicated across accounts, effectively doubling backup storage costs that continue to pile up over time. Costs are further compounded when considering industry retention requirements that go beyond 35 days.

Adding to all the complexity is the fact that it’s difficult to gauge just how many of the backup snapshots in your AWS accounts are even needed. Sure, your bill can display how much you are spending in a particular region, but it doesn’t show the level of granularity regarding the age of the snapshots or assets they are associated with.

Achieve Predictable Costs and Lower TCO with the Industry’s Leading Cloud-Native Backup Solution

You can avoid excessive cloud spending and gain control over backup costs by choosing a cloud backup solution with a simple, straightforward pricing model that clearly spells out the ongoing charges.

Built natively in AWS, Clumio’s backup solution offers the scalability, performance, data protection, and faster access to innovation made possible by the cloud while avoiding the hidden costs, complexity, and limited flexibility of snapshot-based backup solutions.

Simplified Pricing

Clumio’s Pay-As-You-Go consumption model with rollover credits provides enterprises with a simplified and clear backup-as-a-service solution that ensures cost predictability while lowering TCO:

• Transparency – No hidden costs, no license fees, and no egress charges—plus full visibility into data consumption.
• No Friction – Choose from on-demand or commitment contracts with no setup required.
• 100% SaaS – No complex cloud infrastructure or software to install or manage.
• An integrated cost analyzer tool that provides insights to help reduce unnecessary cloud spend

Reduced Storage Spending

Rather than retain Amazon EBS snapshots, Clumio further reduces spending by storing data in a compressed, de-duplicated format in Amazon S3, effectively cutting the cost of long-term EBS data retention. This allows enterprises to meet compliance and develop retention strategies based on business and regulatory requirements instead of costs.

Get Started with Clumio

Clumio offers more than just cost savings. In under 15 minutes, your enterprise can:

• Instantly backup AWS data across your entire organization
• Gain data protection from ransomware attacks and other malicious threats via air-gapped storage
• Meet varying and complex data compliance objectives with global policies
• Lower RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and ensure business continuity in the event of downtime

Experience firsthand why Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for AWS cloud backup. Start your free trial, all without any pre-planning or the need to install new infrastructure or software.