IT managers and business professionals are increasingly drawn to the cost effectiveness of online services to back up and recover corporate data distributed throughout their business on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. They face the challenge of demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of making the change from the current methods for protecting data, managing risk, and keeping a distributed workforce productive.

This White Paper helps managers to build a compelling business case for deploying online data protection services rather than continuing current methods of backup and recovery – or implementing other onsite alternatives. In order to show the profitability of reducing operational costs through an investment in Software as a Service (SaaS) backup and recovery, an ROI analysis must:

• Present the changing landscape of business data management, and the challenges this presents for protecting desktops and laptops throughout an organization
  
• Identify all the costs of current methods (and other alternatives) of data protection
  
• Estimate the cost savings of online data protection over both current and alternative methods

This paper also highlights additional soft benefits; these are difficult to quantify yet have very real value to the corporation in evaluating any data protection strategy.

Finally, included in this paper is a checklist of cost categories for comparing current methods of savings for adopting an online data protection service.