Unreliable backups and recovery times that are too long have long plagued IT organisations. In many ways, data protection has unsettling similarities to insurance: it’s required, it’s expensive, and one hopes never to need it. And, like insurance, one’s objective is to have enough but not too much. To that extent, there is an inevitable cost/benefit business case analysis to any data protection purchase.

In evaluating the business case for data protection products, four primary criteria are used:

• Purchases avoided
  
• Direct savings
  
• Labor savings
  
• Total cost of ownership (TCO)

This paper examines and quantifies the costs and benefits of backup with deduplication storage as strategic assets for data protection.