Why Pay the Same for Backup as Recovery?

There's a growing movement in the software industry to bring more fairness to industry pricing practices. Signs of this sentiment are clearly visible in the backup/recovery industry.

Under the standard pricing model, customers are charged for recovering 100% of their data, even if they rarely need recovery. A recent Enterprise Strategy Group analysis found that IT managers and technical buyers are very willing to switch to a new model for data backup and recovery pricing if making the switch offers savings or technical advantages.

Why should you rethink how you pay for backup and recovery? Here are some reasons:

• Traditional pricing models are obsolete. Agent-based backup software pricing models based on the number of machines protected-and capacity-based pricing models that bill based on capacity of data to protect-are yesterday's methodologies. With the increasing prominence of cloud computing, these old-school models are no longer appropriate for most customers. Companies in which the growth of data exceeds the percentage of data recovered over time require a new pricing metric.

• Pricing should match business value. Without a pricing model revision, the price of backup software/services becomes out of sync with perceived value. In alignment with cloud computing pay-per-use models and to provide a performance-based pricing schema, a new model should allow customers to pay for exactly what they are purchasing the solution for... data recovery. The customer should be billed based specifically on the volume of data that is recovered.

• It's not fair to pay the same for backup as recovery. Agent or capacity-based pricing models are unfair for companies with high data growth or low recovery needs. A fairer approach would be performance-based, with pricing directly correlated to lost information that was recovered using the technology. Those who operate efficient IT shops and thus recover less, should pay less.

• A new pricing model exists now that provides performance-based pricing. There is, in fact, such a solution. Databarracks is joining with Asigra to introduce the Recovery Licensing Model (RLM) for backup and recovery. RLM is a much fairer pricing model available to backup technology buyers because the price is directly tied to how much, or how little, value the customer derives from the solution. The RLM is based on the volume of data recovered, with a price cap of 25% of the total data volume. The technology behind the RLM pricing model is the Asigra Recovery Tracker™, which uses rich recovery analytics to show the percentage of data recovered over time.

• Making the switch brings immediate and sustainable savings. Customers can gain immediate benefits by switching to a service with pricing that is aligned to the value it delivers. With RLM, the savings are sustainable because the pricing is decoupled from data growth and tied to the actual performance.

The RLM is a backup/recovery industry-first as a value-based pricing model. By decoupling backup from price and aligning with a recovery metric instead, it brings the concept of fairness to the backup market. At Databarracks, we're proud to introduce this new model to the market and to drive customers' costs down while aligning with true business value derived from our services.

- Peter Groucutt, Managing Director