Twelve Questions Your Backup Vendor Doesn’t Want You to Ask

Manufacturers are very good at telling you what they do well.  They are not good – understandably so – at telling you what they don’t do well. 

With that in mind, DataPivot has created this list of “12 Questions to Ask Your Backup Vendor.”

1)     Will you provide a sizing guarantee?  Many times vendors will provide a bare minimum of license or storage capacity without factoring in future growth.  Plus, there are some assumptions made that may not be consistent with your understanding or your environment. 
Some vendors intentionally undersize to keep the price down and force you to purchase additional storage later.

2)     Who will support the solution moving forward?  Many implementations can be similar to a “hit and run.”  Will you have access to the engineers who deployed the solution when questions come up down the road?

3)     Can I upgrade the solution myself or do I need to use professional services?  If done properly, an implementation will include knowledge transfer and documentation.  You want to avoid being handcuffed by relying on expensive professional services for basic upgrades. 

4)     What assurances can you provide me that the future features will in fact come to market in the timeframe you stated?  If the company is public, they have more guidelines that they need to adhere to when discussing futures.  Private companies often have more “leeway.”

5)     Will you lock in pricing for future upgrades and renewals?  If not, what increase (or possibly a decrease) can we expect.

6)     Can you do a granular restore of AD?  (Individual attributes, users, groups, or forests).  While you might think this is a given, it is not. 

7)     Do you support Air Gap solutions using tape? For many tape is dead.  But as Mark Twain said: “The reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.”

8)     How do your support immutable storage for Ransomware protection? How seamless does the backup vendor’s software integrate with immutable storage.  Does it require an additional tier of storage first?

9)     If we run your software in the cloud, can we spin the resources up and down? Running in the cloud is not free.  Hyperconverged solutions require a lot of compute and need to be running.   

10)  What type of reporting (alerting, compliance, etc) comes standard out of the box? We see reporting as one of the most underrated areas given to backup software evaluations.  Knowledge is power.  Ask what type of reports you get – out of the box without custom configuration. 

11)  What options do I have for server, storage and cloud platforms?  Some vendors lock you into their appliances or have limited support.  If you want to use some existing hardware or a preferred server manufacturer, ask the backup vendor how they will accommodate. A software  defined solution will give you freedom of choice whereas a hyperconverged solution locks you in. 

12)  What is the cost of archiving data to the cloud?  If you plan to write data to the cloud, find out what costs are included in the proposal. 
Some products require an additional license to archive to S3\Glacier. Many products can’t write deduplicated data to Glacier which keeps the storage costs high. This doesn’t mean you should always use deduplication but you’ll want to understand the costs and also have options. 

If you want to learn more about these - and other questions to ask - please contact your DataPivot sales rep or email sales@datapivottech.com.