The Real Cost of not Automating Backup Checks

A recent conversation with a trial partner prompted me to write this blog post. Initially our trial partner was considering not signing up for our service and saving the money with the manual processes they had in place. 
Email is a universally accepted method for communication. It is why we chose to build Backup Radar to support inbound emails for all backup products. Over 99% of backup products support sending a success/failure email report. The following problems with this method should be considered:

When the absence of an email can prove costly:

What happens if an email isn't received?

Initially our trial partner was satisfied with the internal checking processes that they had in place and were considering not utilizing Backup Radar. Then it happened. Our system was showing a failure on a critical client of theirs for 5 days yet they had no tickets in their system from their manual processes. Their client account was a large revenue account 15k or more per month. Imagine the conversation that they would have had if they had never caught the issue because they were checking the backup reports via email. To them, it was a small chance this would ever happen. Backup software sometimes fails to send a report for an array of different reasons. When one of the business owners logged into our portal we had marked the job as a failure in our system because we hadn't received the backup result. When he asked the admin about why there were no tickets in the PSA for the failure it was determined that the backup system never sent the email. Right then and there they realized the power of our system and what it could do to help them prevent this from happening again. 

What if I have a spreadsheet that is manually checked every day against the emails?

Even if you are manually checking via a spreadsheet this is a very monotonous and mundane task and it takes a lot of time that could be utilized in other areas of your business. It has been our experience admins will still make mistakes due to the sheer volume of emails they have to check to complete a backup. If we save just 1 hour per day then the employee savings more than pays for the cost of the product. If we save a 15k account from canceling because they got Ransomware and had to recover from days to weeks ago then the product has paid for itself for the next 10 years. 

Why Backup Radar?

Backup Radar was built over 4 years to be a world class backup checking system. When we build an email parser it is tested for days to ensure the highest integrity when we put it into production. Backup Radar will beat a human in checking backups 100% of the time and will save you time and money along the way. The system accounts for emails that don't come in via our threshold system that will automatically mark a backup as a failure if we do not receive a report within the threshold.