In the technology oriented modern era, need for data protection holds immense importance. An unprotected data carries the risk of being easily accessible. Hence the importance of disaster recovery to modern businesses is unavoidable. Natural or man-made reasons create disasters and the recovery techniques always come at a price. It is important for businesses to implement cost effectiveness in disaster recovery. Data protection through servers is possible by replicating the data remotely and making it accessible for data restoration and migration. Data should not get corrupted and should be easily restored. Let us now discuss the currently available data storage options. Small physical hard drives are better options for storing fewer amounts of data. Open source tools like rsync is also used for synchronizing data between local machines and remote servers. But these cost efficient tools have limitations while processing large data sets. NAS and SAN storages as well as cloud storage systems are used widely for backing up large data in remote servers.

In case of limited storage space, using incremental backup system is advantageous vis-a-vis full backup system. Incremental backup system initially takes a full backup and then stores the modifications as incremental values so that combining the values will generate a full backup.

While deciding on the cost constraints of data storage, the following factors should be taken care of –

Licensing the data storage and protection cost – ‘Saas’ category software is now available in the market. Backup protection comes at a price and is priced according to the number of backup servers / agents we use. Mostly, online services run on monthly payment mode.

Technical support cost – As the Software itself is built as a service, the vendors have trained technicians for providing support.

Backup hardware cost – is determined by the availability and size of backup its retention and recovery.

Backup maintenance cost – covers the life span of the backup hardware including upgradation and migration cost. Disaster-recovery claim as well as replacement of old hardware with new one can cost dearly.

Instead of purchasing backup servers and implementing backup software, which constitutes SaaS, a better option is to adopt the technology of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), which reduces the backup hardware and maintenance costs. Google cloud platform (https://cloud.google.com/) and Windows-Azure (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/) are two options for reducing cost of backup storage. Here IaaS vendors are responsible for the maintenance and protection of data. Creating backup in the IaaS server with open source tools like snapshot helps in reducing licensing cost. Hiring technicians for performing this task reduces the technical support cost as well.

In case of Server Data Protection Methods, cost reduction cannot be achieved by following a single procedure. Incorporating the positives of different backup systems available in the market can only build a highly reliable and cost-effective backup system.