“The market price of disk storage is constantly falling and, although this is only a small part of the cost for a managed service, we felt this has to be reflected in the prices we offer to the customer,” comments Marcie Terman, managing director at DataFort. “With our current size and capacity, we can lower our price and continue to offer truly secure enterprise-class backup. But we are fearful of some of the players out there who are offering prices that we know can only be achieved by skimping on the service.”

According to DataFort, insufficient monitoring and proofing of the backup process, over-compression of delicate files, and the overuse of ‘delta blocking’ or ‘snapshots’ (saving only changes to data) with insufficient full backups, are now common practice at the low end of the market. All of these failings increase the time taken to restore data, but more worryingly they exponentially increase the likelihood of the restore process failing all together.

“Data backup is one area where you really can’t afford to cut corners, whatever the saving. We are fearful that some of the cheaper services out there may damage the reputation of the managed data backup market as a whole when things go wrong for their customers,” continues Terman. “Low price managed backup is great but if the restore process doesn’t work effectively, it can be a seriously false economy. With any disaster recovery solution we urge users to fully test the restore process.”