What Would It Cost To Build A Back Up Solution In House?

If your company has built your business using cloud data platforms like GitHub, Confluence, and Jira, you’ve likely built up a trove of data inside those platforms. This data is crucial to running your company and making business decisions. You’ll want to ensure it’s backed up in case it gets corrupted or you experience an extended system outage.

Build it vs. Buy it cost comparison

Once you’ve decided that a backup solution is a must-have for your organization, you essentially have two options:

1. Build it yourself
2. Partner with a backup-as-a-service provider such as Rewind

Regardless of what you choose, having a backup of your data is important to ensure business continuity in the case of service failure or interruption.

Of course, the first question that comes to mind at this stage is likely, “What’s the most cost-effective option?” To help you gain clarity on the respective costs of “build versus buy,” we’ve created a handy DIY calculator. Use this tool to compare the cost of building your own backup solution versus leveraging one such as Rewind. 

The calculator

Our calculator includes a variety of inputs to reflect the complicated nature of setting up and maintaining a bespoke backup solution. We’ve included labor, data storage, retention period, and more costs. All dollar amounts are in USD. Here’s a full list of the calculator’s inputs, outputs, assumptions, and formulas.

Assumptions

• We assume you would dedicate 1 full-time developer on this project (or that resource equivalent)
• Maintenance cost / year is equivalent to 50% of the project total cost. This includes additional development costs, cloud computing, and storage costs.

Inputs:

• Number of Integrations (PF)
• Development Time (in Days) (time_to_build)
• Number of Developers (ND)

Variables calculated from inputs:

• Labor rate / day – Constant- (LR) = ex. 108,000/365 = $296/day.

Output 1: Build It Yourself

• Build It Yourself Cost: LR*(time_to_build)
• Maintenance Cost /month: 0.5*Build_it_yourself_cost/12

Output 2: Partner with Rewind

• Cost of using Rewind / Platform / month: Platform Cost * ND

Understanding the risks of SaaS integrations

Cloud outages are becoming increasingly common. Regardless of how much redundancy engineers build into these systems, they’re here to stay. Consider these recent examples of significant cloud outages:

• An outage, which began on April 5, 2022, affected 400 customers, including Jira, the Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Opsgenie, and lasted two weeks until April 18, 2022.
• In early September, according to multiple reports, GitHub servers weren’t working properly. The issue prevented millions of developers from accessing community projects or their own projects.

The risk of data theft or compromise resulting from a cyberattack is another compelling reason to consider implementing a robust backup solution. Unfortunately, attackers frequently set their sights on cloud-based platforms with the specific intent of stealing or illegally accessing data.

While cyberattacks on large organizations tend to dominate the news headlines, cybercriminals more frequently target small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In a recent survey, 58% of CISOs of SMEs said that their risk of attack was higher compared to their large enterprise counterparts. Given that most SMEs have small IT departments, it’s challenging for them to protect themselves from ongoing and increasingly sophisticated attacks that don’t discriminate based on organizational size.

Accidental data loss isn’t uncommon either – especially in the world of software development, which is all about creating, experimenting, testing, and iterating. Your developers need to know they can innovate at will without running the risk of losing their work. Unfortunately, there’s not always an “undo” button to fall back on!

Depending on the industry and geography in which you operate, data loss or compromise could get you into hot water from a regulatory perspective, possibly resulting in steep fines. Downtime resulting from data loss can also cost you dearly in terms of productivity losses and the need to redo hours, days, or even weeks of work.

Other considerations

Deciding on the most appropriate backup solution for your cloud data is just as important as the information you want to secure. If you already have a large technology team with experience in these platforms and the capacity and skill set to manage a custom backup and restoration solution, a self-built backup solution might be a strong option.

That being said, do you really want your smart developers to spend time building, testing, deploying, and monitoring a bespoke backup solution? And that’s assuming everything goes well. If something goes wrong and you need to restore your data, you’re looking at more time and money just to get your business back up and running once more.

A solution like Rewind lets your developers focus on what they do best – building and honing software and apps that can give you a competitive advantage in your marketplace. It’s fast and simple to deploy, gives you peace of mind that you have reliable, comprehensive backup coverage, and can restore your data quickly and easily if something goes wrong.

Summing up

While scripts for creating your own backups are freely available on the web, automating these backups and allowing for restore is the real challenge. Furthermore, the costs of creating and maintaining your own solution can quickly add up, so it’s important to evaluate your options carefully depending on how much your company relies on having complete and accurate cloud data.

Learn more about Rewind’s solutions for software development.

Special thanks to our friends at Rewind for their insights on this topic.