Backup TCO: The Hidden Costs

When IT teams calculate backup TCO, they usually focus on the line items that show up on invoices: software licenses, hardware appliances, and cloud storage subscriptions. Those numbers are real, and they’re not small—we’re talking five, six, sometimes seven-figure purchases. But here’s the problem: those visible costs are actually the minor part of what you’re spending on backup infrastructure.

This blog post summarizes the main points of my latest podcast episode. If you’d like, you can listen to it or watch it at https://www.backupwrapup.com/

The true backup TCO includes something that most organizations don’t want to talk about: the cost of the human beings who manage the system. This is what the industry calls “soft costs,” and they’re anything but soft when you add them up.

Why Soft Costs Dominate Your Backup TCO

Let me share a perspective that surprises a lot of people. When I was doing consulting and sales engineering work, customers would often say upfront: “I don’t want to hear about soft costs.” They wanted to focus on the technology price tag, not the labor component.

But here’s the reality: soft costs are the biggest part of backup TCO.

A study from Unitrends found that more than half of the environments they analyzed required over 10 hours per week of backup management. Think about that. At typical IT salary and benefits rates, you’re looking at $15,000 to $30,000 per year just in backup babysitting—and that’s for a single person spending a quarter of their time on it.

For larger organizations with dedicated backup teams working 24/7 coverage, the labor costs can dwarf everything else in the backup budget. I’ve seen environments with nine-person backup teams working overlapping 13-hour shifts. That’s a massive ongoing expense that never shows up in the software licensing discussion.

The Cloud Storage Trap in Your Backup TCO

Cloud storage has become a popular component of modern backup architectures—and for good reason. You get offsite copies, potential immutability with object lock, and you check the boxes for 3-2-1 backup strategies.

But cloud storage has a sneaky way of destroying your backup TCO if you’re not careful.

The problem comes down to retention and forever incrementals. When you’re using deduplication-based backup with forever incremental strategies, you create dependencies between backup blocks that make cleanup complicated. Add object lock into the mix—where data literally cannot be deleted until the lock expires—and you’ve got a recipe for storage costs that grow forever.

I’ve seen organizations start copying backups to S3 with good intentions, then forget to implement proper retention policies. A few months later, they get a cloud bill that makes their CFO’s head explode.

The fix? Build your retention strategy into the design phase, before you start copying data. Understand how your backup software handles block-level dependencies. And if you’re using object lock, make sure you know exactly how and when that data will age out.

Calculating Complete Backup TCO: The Labor Component

So what does the labor piece of backup TCO actually include? It’s more than just running backups. Here’s what eats up those hours:

Configuration and setup. Modern backup systems require thoughtful architecture. You need to think about least-privilege access controls (not the hospital in Spain that gave everyone doctor-level privileges because it was easier). You need to plan your retention policies. You need to integrate with your security monitoring.

Daily operations. Checking backup logs. Investigating failures. Troubleshooting connectivity issues. Dealing with agents that stop responding. All of this takes time.

Capacity management. If you’re running on-premises infrastructure, someone has to track storage consumption, predict when you’ll run out, go through budget cycles, procure new equipment, and rack and stack it before you hit the wall. Deduplication makes this even harder because predicting dedupe ratios is basically impossible—you end up over-provisioning just to be safe.

Security monitoring. With 96% of ransomware attacks now targeting backup infrastructure (according to one study), you can’t ignore security. That means more time spent on monitoring, hardening, and validating that your backups haven’t been compromised.

Reducing Your Backup TCO Through Automation

The path to lower backup TCO runs through automation. The more you can remove humans from the equation, the less you’re spending on labor.

This is one of the reasons I’m a fan of SaaS-based backup solutions. When the vendor handles the hardware, the software upgrades, the capacity management, and the security hardening, you get to focus on policy and recovery testing rather than infrastructure babysitting.

Is SaaS backup more expensive on paper? Sometimes. But when you factor in the complete backup TCO—including all those labor hours you’re saving—it often comes out ahead. And you get a better security posture as a bonus, because you’re relying on people who do backup infrastructure security full-time rather than someone learning it as a side project.

Cloud tiering is another automation win. Products like Rubrik, Cohesity, and Data Domain support automatic tiering to cloud storage, which means you’re not managing capacity yourself. The storage just grows as needed.

Making Better Backup TCO Decisions

When you’re evaluating backup solutions, resist the temptation to focus only on invoice costs. Yes, you need to know what the software and hardware will cost. But you also need to ask:

• How many hours per week will this system require?
• What’s the learning curve for my team?
• Does this vendor’s interface look like it was designed in 1993, or have they invested in usability?
• Can I automate capacity management, or will I be stuck in procurement cycles?
• What’s the security maintenance burden?

These questions will tell you a lot more about your real backup TCO than a price quote ever will.

The person managing backups today could be doing higher-value work: planning for future projects, implementing ransomware protections, or building better disaster recovery processes. Every hour they spend babysitting backup jobs is an hour they’re not contributing to those strategic initiatives.

That’s the real cost of backup infrastructure—and it’s time we started tracking it.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at S2|DATA, which helps companies manage their legacy data