How to go about the Backup Software Purchase Decision?

Buying backup may be a daunting task even to the most experienced software specialist. Search engines provide a good source of information, however, do you have time to scour millions of search results? Most search engines rank these results on commercial basis rather than on the software requirements of their users. Are you willing to trust one of your most valuable possessions - your data - to rankings based on everything else other than you data protection requirements. This article introduces you to a method designed to assist you in buying backup software and making sure that you feel secure that your data is protected.

The purchase decision of such specialist software as backup may be a daunting task simply because you may be looking at the problem from the "I-want-to-backup-my-data" perspective. However, is data backup the real prevention to data loss? Is data backup the real solution for you? Or is it the ability to reproduce the original data in its original uncorrupted state prior to disaster or adverse conditions?

As Jon Surmacz of CIO Magazine reports, "storing data is the easy part; recovering data is another story". To ensure continuity we usually advise customers to look at the problem of data loss due to disaster from the perspective of being able to restore the original data with 100% accuracy.

Such a perspective also dictates the dire need for defining what kind of data is at risk, what level of expertise you have, your outlay in buying backup software, the amount of money required to maintain consistent and regular backups, what are your exact requirements and, finally, analyzing the competitive offerings available in view of all these issues.

People who have a systematic methodology for assessing these competitive offerings are more liable to choose the right backup software than those that do not.

Such methodology consists of analyzing and ranking vendors across the industry-standard attributes of backup software - those of "ease of use", "cost of ownership", "performance", "reliability", "depth of features", and "breadth of coverage".

People often tackle the problem of buying software that they have little or know expertise about by 'googling'. Looking for generic search terms (e.g., backup software) is highly convenient - people then usually select the product that either looks as if it will do the trick (i.e., backup) or it is reasonably priced. However, grave mistakes are committed when you decide solely on the basis of cursory product impressions and price.

You must think and act beyond price and search engine rankings. For example, I have just googled "backup software" and returned 111 million matches.

The first company to appear is Veritas Software - this company is one of the largest and most impressive technology companies in the market today. However, it produces top-notch backup software that is used by large companies but is guaranteed to burn a hole in your pocket if you are a home user or a small business. Not only is the capital outlay inaccesible (in the $000s) but installing and running the software requires specialist knowledge.

So, before turning to the convenience of the web, we always suggest that you formalize your requirements down to the minutest detail by defining:

• The nature of data is at risk - is it emails? Is it digital photographs? For example, this effects the size of the storage devices required to store your back up files.
• What data is most valuable and mission-critical. This could range from emails to family photos to sensitive financial data depending upon your situation.
  
• How frequently you wish to perform backups.
  
• What storage devices you will use to store your backed up data.
  
• What kind of guarantees you require from your backup software and what level of accuracy would you be happy with.
  
• What is your level of expertise i.e. you don't mind having complex user interfaces and minimial assistance from the vendor.
  
• What's your budget to buy the software and how much are you willing to spend on running the software in terms, for example, of DVDs and CDs to store the backup files.

These are all elements of a well-crafted backup strategy that will provide you with the foundations for building specification sheets that describe your data protection and continuity requirements.

At the end of the day, backup software is like taking out an insurance policy on your data. And when buying insurance, people have well thought-out plans and details of what they need and it is only on the basis of these plans and details that they seek out policy providers automatically weeding out those who are not compatible for one reason or another.

People who that start their buying process by recognizing that the problem of purchasing backup is really one of developing a strategy that ensures full and accurate recovery of data (thus, continuity) in times of adverse conditions, are almost assured of an excellent choice.

The more popular methodology for analyzing competing brands is to define the main attributes used by the industry to describe its offerings and to examine the product features of each brand in the light of these attributes.