Make no mistake about it, backup costs can mount up. There are so many things that contribute the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of a backup platform, including:
Backup software (may be cloud native)
Data volumes
Egress network costs
Storage
Staffing
Backup infrastructure such as virtual machines required to power the data movement
Ad infin.
A backup platform for a medium sized corporation may be costing $1M p.a; so any cost you could drive out of this could well be welcomed.
The Hidden Human Cost
One of the first hidden costs that not too many people think of is the human cost to run. An extremely large corporation with thousands of jobs running through the backup systems daily could require say six team members. I have consulted for companies where they are happy with a 5% backup failure rate, but when you think about it that is not only 5% of your data that has not backed up, but there are 5% of jobs that now have to be reviewed and remediated. That is on top of general daily maintenance, panics and restorations. If a backup system runs 10,000 jobs in a 24 hour period, with a failure rate of 5% that is 500 jobs that must be reviewed and fixed with potential re-running during the day, or even making the decision to hold over as the backup load may be detrimental to the system. 500 jobs each taking 5 minutes to review is 1.7 days. There is no way one person could keep up with such an accumulating and compounding failure rate. There would have to be two team members just to keep on top of the failures. Phew!
Note: that often backup jobs that fail have a retry. Are you storing multiple retries? Consider looking at your top failing backups that take the most space.
