How a Qld provider turned backup pricing on its head

User-generated content and collaboration are all trends that dramatically drive up the volume of information flowing through a business. The explosion in data creates several problems, the largest of which is the accompanying rise in storage and backup costs.

Enter LiveBackup, a Brisbane backup specialist with a revolutionary plan to charge companies not on the amount of data they use – but on their ability to manage their data effectively. LiveBackup is owned by Queens­land’s GComm, a 40-employee managed services provider with a turnover of $13 million that was founded as Data FX Online in 1996. LiveBackup has been around since 2010 and stores 400TB of data for corporate customers.

But if the boom in data is such a gold mine for companies such as LiveBackup, why launch a service that could earn you less money?

Todd Brooker, sales director for LiveBackup, says the company has come up with a clever way to address spiralling data costs. “The only way to mitigate it is to bring down the price of a backup component and split it in two. Let’s try and reward people rather than give them one big cost for backup and they can restore as much as they like.”

LiveBackup has introduced a service that rewards customers with discounted prices the longer they avoid restoring their data. Corporate clients pay a flat rate for the backup service, a flat rate for storage and a restore licence that varies according to the amount of data restored. A company that restores less than 5 percent of their total data volume in a 12-month period could save up to 50 percent on their backup costs, Brooker says.

“The whole idea of this model is to reward good behaviour. It’s similar to car insurance. If you don’t make any claims then you’re on the best rate and no excess,” Brooker says.

“Every 12 months, we review and see whether our customers are follow­ing best practices, and then they get rewarded with a better rate on their backup. If they go the other way, they continue to pay the high prices that they’re used to paying.”

The industry average for backing up a terabyte of data is between $1,000 and $1,200 per month, Brooker says. LiveBackup is reducing its prices from “around the $1,000 mark” to $500 for customers that rarely restore their data.

LiveBackup can store data in two data centres for financial institutions that require copies stored in separate geographic locations. The service is clearly targeted at corporate customers, with a minimum requirement of 1TB for data and increasing in 1TB increments.

The company is aiming to scoop up companies with big appetites for data. The more terabytes of data, the more cost effective are additional costs such as support.

“A 10TB customer is going to pay a different support cost than a 2TB customer,” Brooker says.

LiveBackup has been growing at 20 percent year-on-year, and Brooker says the new service could increase that to 30 percent a year, with more services to come. A full disaster recovery suite is in the pipeline. Based on Asigra software, the service backs up servers, desktops, mobile phones and tablets. It can also back up cloud services such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

The enterprise-grade program doesn’t require the installation of a local agent on computers that require backing up, although an app is required for iOS and Android devices.

LiveBackup installs a “fast restore box” on site, which holds up to 14 days of backups. It uses common file elimination and deduplication to reduce the amount of data sent over the wire to LiveBackup’s data centre. Customers are charged only for the amount of data stored.

A company can store data for seven to 10 years in LiveBackup’s data centre and relies on deduplication to reduce data growth to a minimum.