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 Data Protection
by the Numbers
Veeam Special Edition

by Jason Buffington
Author of Data Protection
for Virtual Data Centers

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 Data Protection by the Numbers For Dummies®,
Veeam Special Edition

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 Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
The Rosetta Stone of Data Protection................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 2
How This Book is Organized................................................................ 2
Chapter 1: Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA....................... 2
Chapter 2: Operational Metrics: RA and BIA................................ 3
Chapter 3: Calculating the Cost of Downtime.............................. 3
Chapter 4: Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI................................... 3
Chapter 5: Ten Keys to Better C ­ onversations.............................. 3
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 4
Where to Go from Here........................................................................ 4

CHAPTER 1: Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA......................... 5

Recovery Point Objective...................................................................... 5
Recovery Time Objective...................................................................... 8
Putting RPO and RTO Together......................................................... 10
Making RPO and RTO Real with SLAs................................................ 11

CHAPTER 2: Operational Metrics: RA and BIA................................... 15

Risk Analysis: The Science of Worrying............................................. 15
What could possibly go wrong?.................................................... 16
How likely is it?............................................................................... 17
Business Impact Analysis: How Much Will It Cost?.......................... 18
Always Turn Technologies into Dollars............................................. 19

CHAPTER 3: Calculating the Cost of Downtime................................ 21

Taking a Look at Four Simple Variables............................................ 22
Lost data......................................................................................... 23
Outage time.................................................................................... 24
Human costs................................................................................... 24
Profitability..................................................................................... 25
Applying the Formula in the Real World........................................... 25
Calculating downtime costs for just one
group or workload......................................................................... 26
Adapting the formula to your business...................................... 28

Table of Contents iii

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 CHAPTER 4: Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI....................................... 31
Total Cost of Ownership..................................................................... 31
Return on Investment......................................................................... 34
Calculating ROI............................................................................... 34
Determining which ROI method is the most accurate.............. 36
Examining the credibility challenge of ROI................................. 37
You Should Hope They Argue with Your Formulas......................... 38

CHAPTER 5: Ten Keys to Better Conversations................................ 41

Start with More Conversations........................................................... 41
Get Your SLAs Right the First Time.................................................... 42
Realize Backup Admins Rarely Make Good Disaster
Recovery Planners............................................................................... 42
Quantify IT Challenges in Operational and Financial Impacts....... 42
Recognize That There is a Huge Cost in Doing Nothing................. 42
Acknowledge That Downtime Costs More Than You Think........... 43
Make Sure Your Stakeholders Argue with Your Formulas............. 43
Don’t Forget the Soft Costs................................................................ 44
Embrace the Fact That Regulations Are Your Friend...................... 44
Get Your Data Out of the Building.................................................... 44

iv Data Protection by the Numbers For Dummies, Veeam Special Edition

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 Introduction
N umbers make everything equal.

Quantitative metrics allow you to compare a range of availability

and protection alternatives objectively, without the bias of expe-
rience or preconceptions or vendor preference. In this book, we
look at several metrics. We start by defining each one and then
applying them to the discussion of what kind(s) of data pro-
tection, data retention, and data availability you may need for
­different scenarios.

Data protection, including backup, is often regarded as an unsolv-

able nuisance that adds complexity and budgetary burden while
remaining unreliable and cumbersome. The goal of this book is
not to persuade you to purchase anything — in fact, no vendors or
products are listed except for Veeam’s cover logo and back cover
product information as the sponsor of this guidebook. Veeam feels
it’s critical for you to gain an understanding of and a formulaic
approach to quantifying technical recovery capabilities, business
impacts, and financial concerns related to data protection.

The Rosetta Stone of Data Protection

The famous Rosetta stone essentially has the same information
carved into one side in three different languages. Because of this,
people who could read in one language could derive the transla-
tions of the other languages, thereby enabling them to communi-
cate. Each of the three “languages” of data protection has its own
terms, priorities, and three-letter acronyms — the trick is simply
to be able to translate between the native tongue of each “tribe”:

»» IT professionals deal with recovery point objectives

(RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) as the basis
of their measurements of certain data protection tools
and technologies.
»» Operations professionals deal with business impact
analyses (BIAs) and risk assessments (RAs) to take stock of

Introduction 1

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 the organization’s preparedness for crises of all kinds (with
and without IT considerations).
»» Financial professionals are barely concerned with concepts
such as backups and IT policies, but they do care about
investments and returns. That means they tend to see
everything through the lenses of total cost of ownership
(TCO) and return on investment (ROI).

If you’re an IT professional who can translate operational goals

and business impact into IT mechanisms (and vice versa), you’ll
get the IT stuff you want  — and eventually, a promotion from
being “just” an IT professional.

Data Protection by the Numbers For Dummies is about helping

you  understand each of the three languages of data protection
numbers — and helping you translate between them.

About This Book

To continue the Rosetta stone analogy, this book is meant to
help IT professionals tasked with data protection responsi-
bilities to empathize with, communicate with, and eventually
­collaborate with the operational and financial stakeholders within
their ­organizations. Simply put, if you can translate operational
requirements into metrics such as uptime and business impact
(when systems aren’t up), you can objectively choose the right
data ­protection technologies. And, if you can translate downtime
and data loss into financial impact, and then quantify the cost
savings or new recognizable value, you can pay for it.

How This Book is Organized

Since we describe this book as a Rosetta stone, you can find chap-
ters about each of the three data protection languages.

Chapter 1: Technical Metrics:

RPO, RTO, and SLA
Chapter 1 starts where most backup administrators and other IT
professionals responsible for data protection should start: with
the understanding of downtime and data loss. RTOs and RPOs are

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 both the real metrics of data protection and the fodder for data
protection marketing. We explain how to think of this concept in
practical terms, and then we focus on establishing reasonable and
attainable service level agreements (SLAs).

Chapter 2: Operational
Metrics: RA and BIA
Chapter  2 covers the realm of business continuity and disaster
recovery experts who serve operational groups, business units,
and executive leadership. In this chapter, we cover BIAs, RAs, and
“the art of worrying.”

Chapter 3: Calculating the

Cost of Downtime
The practical application of being able to translate between RTO/
RPO (capabilities) and BIA/RA (needs) is the ability to quan-
tify the cost of downtime. The reason that most organizations
­undervalue IT functions, like backup, is a lack of appreciation for
what ­recoverability or nonrecoverability means to the organi-
zation. Chapter 3 breaks down the cost of downtime to four key
variables. It then frames the dialogue on how IT and operational
professionals can sit down to adapt the generic formula to one
that accurately measures the organization.

Chapter 4: Financial Metrics:

TCO and ROI
Most IT folks cannot simply choose to purchase technology in a
vacuum; there has to be some level of justification to the business.
Just as important, the costs of the solution(s) to be considered
are typically far more than the prices of the components under
consideration. Chapter  4 helps you work through quantifying
the costs associated with data protection mechanisms (TCO) and
how to effectively articulate the comparative benefits of the solu-
tion compared with the recently quantified cost of the problem
explored in Chapters 2 and 3.

Chapter 5: Ten Keys to Better

­Conversations
Driving a conversation that aligns technical, operational, and
financial goals while responding to objections to those technical,

Introduction 3

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 operational, and financial goals is not trivial. Set those challenges
against the jaded “burden” of backup and it can be daunting.
Chapter  5 highlights ten facets of this process and the building
of bridges to help you make these conversations happen, if for no
other reason than to help you get the better data protection that
you probably already know you want.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons are used throughout this book to call attention to material
worth noting in a special way. Here’s a list of those icons, along
with a description of each one:

Some points bear repeating, and others bear remembering. When

you see this icon, take special note of what you’re about to read.

Watch out! This information tells you to steer clear of topics

that may leave you vulnerable, cost you big bucks, or suck down
your time.

This icon indicates technical information that is probably most

interesting to technology planners and architects.

If you see the Tip icon, pay attention: You’re about to find out how
to save some aggravation and time.

Where to Go from Here

Seasoned IT professionals often “know” (by instinct) that they
need better data protection than they’re now using, but far too
many don’t know how to justify that purchase and make it hap-
pen. This book is intended to help you change the dialogue so
that all three groups of stakeholders can agree on the imperative
nature of the problem and the justification for a better solution.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Recovery point objective (RPO)

»» Recovery time objective (RTO)

»» RPO and RTO combined as problem

statement

»» Service level agreement (SLA)

Chapter  1
Technical Metrics:
RPO, RTO, and SLA

W
hen comparing the wide range of data protection tech-
nologies and methodologies, the two technical metrics
that provide a standard for comparison are the recovery
point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO).
For  an introduction to these terms, consider a typical nightly
backup scenario where a full backup is made every weekend and
an incremental backup is made every evening after users leave
work.

Recovery Point Objective

The topic of RPO starts by asking, “How much data can we afford
to lose?” and “How frequently should we protect the data?” Where
RPO can really matter is as a method to objectively compare the
diverse range of data protection and availability technologies.

RPO is often thought of as simply the amount of data that can be

lost. That’s not the whole story, but you can start there. If you’re
backing up every evening  — and assuming that nothing goes

CHAPTER 1 Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA 5

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 wrong during the backup or the recovery — the most you can lose
due to an IT outage is one day’s worth of business data. If your
data is made up solely of documents from Word or Excel, you have
lost only those documents that were updated that day. If your
data ­consists of transactions such as financial records, the con-
sequences could be worse. Imagine that you work in a financial
institution and, in one day, most (if not all) of your accounts have
some kind of activity, including not only deposits and withdrawals
but also changes in value. If you lose a day’s worth of those trans-
actions, the entire data set is no longer valid.

The key point here is that you must assess the potential for data
loss in two ways:

»» The time spent re-creating lost data

»» The scope of data that will be lost or affected
To expand on this statement, assume that a reliable backup takes
place every evening and that restore operations will always work,
which is already a dangerous assumption. I explain, later in this
chapter, why this assumption doesn’t usually apply; but, for now,
that supposition helps with the example. With that in mind, con-
sider these two extreme scenarios:

»» If the server were to fail at the beginning of the business

day, almost no data would be lost since the last backup. The
actual data loss would be measured at nearly zero because
nearly nothing would have changed since the last recovery
point or backup event.
»» If the server were to fail at the end of the business day,
that entire day’s worth of data would be lost because no
backups (recovery points) would have been created since
the preceding midnight. The data loss would be measured
as a full day’s worth.

If you average these two extremes, you can presume that the server
will always fail at noon — halfway into the business day. Statisti-
cally speaking, companies that rely on nightly backup alone will
lose, on average, half of one day’s worth of data.

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 A “SERVER” BY ANY OTHER NAME
For the purposes of this book, server refers to a physical, virtual, or
cloud-instantiated platform that is hosting data in order to deliver
IT services. According to industry analysts, 52 percent of IT outages
within a data center are caused by hardware. In earlier days, this would
equate to a single (physical) server being impacted, but today the vast
majority of physical infrastructure is in support of virtualization, where
20 virtual machines (VMs) might reside within a single physical host,
thereby compounding the impact of downtime exponentially.

So, although it would be easy to infer that individual VMs (on-premises

or in a cloud) won’t suffer individual hardware issues, the risk of their
hosts experiencing a physical issue is gravely more impactful.

To learn the whole story when looking at RPO, it’s the O that is
most important. RPO is an objective (or goal). It specifies how
much data you’re willing to lose. In a nightly backup, the statisti-
cal probability is that you will lose a half-day of data. But if you
establish your RPO at half-day and then your server fails in the
afternoon, you have actually lost more data than you planned —
and you fall short of your goal or objective. In fact, you’ll likely
miss that goal close to half the time. So, most would set an RPO
as one-day, meaning that it’s an acceptable business loss to lose
an entire day of data, because of the recognition that backups are
occurring only nightly.

In the case of nightly backup, the unit of measure for RPO is in

days (for example, half-day or full day) because backup operations
normally take place daily or, more specifically, nightly. To have
an RPO (a goal) for how much data you can afford to lose using a
measure less than days, you have to protect the data more often than
nightly. That usually takes backup-alone  — and by ­association,
tape-only solutions — out of the equation. ­Disk-based ­solutions
often replicate hourly or every few minutes or seconds or in
­real-time. RPO essentially becomes the measurement of data pro-
tection frequency, regardless of media choices.

CHAPTER 1 Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA 7

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 For the purposes of this book, the three most common data pro-
tection mechanisms are defined as

»» Backup: A point-in-time copy of data that is stored on

secondary disk, tapes, or within cloud-storage for the
purposes of previous version retention. Backups are usually
created on a daily or less frequent basis, have been com-
pressed or deduplicated to save space over time, and are
usually stored for months to years.
»» Snapshot: A relatively recent point in time based on a series
of blocks within the production storage system. Snapshots
can be created every few minutes or hours, are composed
of pointers to block-level changes, and are usually retained
within the primary storage system for only days.
»» Replica: A current or near-current copy of data that is in its
original format but residing in an alternate location (offsite
for BC/DR, for example). Replication can occur in real-time
(synchronous), delayed (asynchronous), or on a recurring
schedule, usually measured in minutes or hours. At each
point, the secondary copy is overwritten with whatever has
changed from the original source.

Note that these three data protection mechanisms complement

each other — and are often (and should be) used together.

Recovery Time Objective

RTO starts by asking the question “How long can we afford
to be without our data?”  — which can also be asked this way:
“How long can our services be out of operation?” Using the same
nightly-backup scenario as in the earlier section “Recovery Point
Objective”, RTO is the goal (objective) for how long it takes to
conduct a recovery. The question begins with “How long will the
restore take?”

In the earlier example of nightly backup, RPO is measured in days

or partial days because that’s how often a data protection (backup)
event is occurring — every night. But for this same example, RTO
is measured in hours because it’s a performance measure of the
components in your solution itself. If your backup software and
secondary storage can restore up to 2 terabytes (TB) per hour and

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 the production server has 6TB of data, time to restore the data is
roughly 3 hours  — or, more specifically, 3 hours from when the
restore function begins.

If your largest server holds 10TB of data and your protection stor-
age can restore 2TB per hour, and if you’re confident that you
could immediately locate the right tapes and restoration could
begin soon after, then you might specify an RTO of 5 hours — or
6, to be cautious. But you’ll also lose time between the moment
the outage occurs and the moment you invoke the restore process
(with or without diagnostics time on the original server). As such,
you will likely round up and specify an RTO of one-day.

To help you appreciate what real-world RTO goals look like,

industry research suggests that nearly half of all servers have an
RTO goal of less than 15 minutes. (See Figure 1-1).

Source: ESG Real World SLAs and Availability Methods, December 2017

FIGURE 1-1: How recovery times stack up.

Nearly seven of eight servers have an RTO of six hours or less,

which, according to the earlier examples in this chapter, negates
a backup-alone approach to data protection. Instead, roughly half
of all server datasets supplement backups with replication, and a
third supplement with snapshots.

CHAPTER 1 Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA 9

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 Putting RPO and RTO Together
Let me now combine the examples I’ve used in this chapter.

Assume that the server being protected in this scenario failed on

Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. It will take most of the next day to recover
the server. If IT personnel are in the same office, you can opti-
mistically identify what has failed and, if necessary, arrange for
replacement parts to arrive early Thursday morning. On Thurs-
day, the server will be repaired and the data restored. By Thursday
evening, the server will be rebuilt and recovered. The recovery
time will be one business day and (you hope) within the RTO.

The unfortunate part of this scenario is twofold for users:

»» Thursday is a wasted day for users because they cannot get

to their data while items are being repaired, replaced, and
restored.
»» Wednesday’s data is likely lost because the server, when it’s
restored, will be restored to the latest successful backup
(Tuesday night). Everything that was created on Wednesday
(after the Tuesday backup) will likely have been lost when the
server storage failed. The recovery point was within one day
of lost data (Tuesday midnight through Wednesday at point
of failure), which is again, you hope, within the set RPO.

To improve RPO, you need to perform data protection more often

than nightly. For this, you must turn to replication and snapshot
mechanisms, in complement to backups (not replacement of).

To improve RTO, you need a faster restore medium, which usu-

ally points to disk instead of tape or cloud for routine restore
operations. In addition, frequency of protection can also shrink
RTO because the amount of data to be restored shrinks with each
iteration.

But just measuring RPO and RTO isn’t enough. You have to trans-
late your solution’s RPO and RTO capabilities as something pre-
dictable that can be understood and agreed to by the business and
operational stakeholders of the company. You have to set a service
level agreement (SLA), as described in the following section.

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 Making RPO and RTO Real with SLAs
When you recognize that the O in both RPO and RTO is objective,
you run into one of the key problems in most plans for data pro-
tection and availability. An objective is a goal, not a promise. The
promise comes when you describe your capabilities to the stake-
holders in the business, for example, when you tell the man-
agement of the people who rely on the server that they will be
“running again within one business day and will lose an average
of a half-day of data, but potentially a full day of data.” You might
tell the management team that, with nightly backup, you could
have an RPO of a half-day of lost data and that the RTO might
be one business day to repair the server and restore the data. But
those are goals based on ideal circumstances.

What happens when the circumstances are not ideal? In the sce-
nario I describe of the nightly backup of a failed server, I’ve made
a few assumptions:

»» You can react quickly to the server outage.

If you have IT staff on-site, they can identify the issue
almost immediately.
If you don’t have IT on-site, the entire restore-time window
will be longer because nothing can happen until you get
there (or remotely connect).
»» The server is readily repairable. In the example, the server
failed at 4 p.m. on Wednesday.
If parts are available, repairs can begin immediately.
If you happen to be on the US East Coast, you can
expedite parts from a West Coast provider, where they
can be sent overnight and repairs can begin the next
morning.
If you happen to be on the US West Coast, you may not
be able to get parts for another whole business day —
and everything else will be prolonged accordingly.
»» Every recovery point (on disk, tape, or cloud) is readable.
If the latest Tuesday evening backup is somehow
corrupted, you will only be able to restore through
Monday’s copy. You will have lost another day of data
(RPO), and you will likely lose time trying to restore

CHAPTER 1 Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA 11

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 Tuesday’s data before you can identify the failure
(longer RTO).
If you’re doing incremental backups (only nightly changes)
instead of differential backups and Monday’s data is bad,
then Tuesday’s data is mostly irrelevant. Tuesday’s
incremental contains the differences between Monday
and Tuesday; without a successful restore of Monday’s
data, however, Tuesday’s changes may not be substan-
tive. This varies by the production workload (as well as by
the backup software’s tolerance for failed recovery points
within the storage repository).
If one of the weekend full backups is bad, then Monday’s
and Tuesday’s are irrelevant because everything is in the
context of the last full backup (which is unusable).

It’s not the best of both worlds, by any means, but I can describe
two last-resort recovery scenarios:

»» If the daily incremental data is not overwritten each week

(that is, this Tuesday replaces last Tuesday), you can restore
the full backup from a week earlier and then the incremen-
tals or differentials from the previous week. In short, when
the server is repaired on Thursday afternoon (and accessed
Friday morning), the data will be as it was the Thursday from
a week before — the last good copy.
»» If the daily backups are overwritten, the data will be restored
only to the full backup from a week ago. All data for the
previous week, as well as the beginning of this week, is lost
(10 days of data in the example).

These aren’t niche cases or a dramatic calamity-of-errors.

They’re just examples of how easily the reality can fail to match
the ideal RPO and RTO that are defined by the hardware and soft-
ware of the data protection solution. It is for these reasons (where
reality doesn’t match the ideal RPO and RTO) that the SLA — your
assurance to the business units of what your recovery capabilities
are — needs to be broader than just stating the RPO and RTO of
the technologies themselves.

You need to consider the processes and potential pitfalls of

whatever technical solution(s) and recovery processes you are
considering:

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 »» Time to React: Sites without IT staff should have longer RTO
SLAs than sites with IT staff, because it will take time to get there,
depending on the arrangement, connectivity, and type of failure.
Perhaps IT staff can drive or fly from their primary location to
the remote office. Perhaps a local integrator or channel reseller
can be dispatched; in that case, a pre-negotiated contract may
have to be put into place, including an SLA from them to you on
their committed response rate to your issue.
»» Time to Repair: Should spare parts or even complete cold-
standby servers be acquired? Where can parts or servers be
expedited from? Does a pre-negotiated agreement need to
be signed between you and a vendor or distributor?
»» Technical RPO and RTO: These relate to issues involving the
RPO and RTO, as well as the perceived failure rate of the
media.

Notice that technology isn’t mentioned until the last item. The
first aspects of a server recovery SLA relate to people and process,
followed by materials and access. Once you get to the technology,
you’re likely more in the comfort zone of the IT professional, but
there are still unknowns concerning the technology. With all of
that addressed, after the server is ready to be restored, RTO still
varies based on whether you’re restoring from Monday or Friday:

»» Presume that you start with a full backup, meaning a

complete and autonomous copy of the data each weekend.
»» With differentials, you start with the full backup and then will
layer on the Thursday night differential (the changes since
the last full). But a Thursday differential will have appreciably
more data to restore than the Monday differential.
»» With incrementals, you see a similarly linear increase in
restore time, as each subsequent incremental is layered
on top of the incremental before it: Monday-to-Tuesday,
Tuesday-to-Wednesday, and so on. Unfortunately, in this
imperfect world, if a recovery point (on tape, disk, or cloud)
fails, such as the Tuesday incremental, then Wednesday’s
and Thursday’s incrementals might be unusable.

All these overly dire and pessimistic examples are designed ­simply
to prompt you to compare your data protection technology’s pre-
sumed RPO and RTO to what you — as the IT professional respon-
sible for data protection — can assure your management of being
able to deliver.

CHAPTER 1 Technical Metrics: RPO, RTO, and SLA 13

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 Here’s the secret to a successful SLA: Salespeople call it sandbagging,
where what you forecast will sell is less than what you believe
is likely. Others might call it underpromising and overdeliver-
ing. As a consultant and an IT implementer, I call it planning for
­Murphy’s law.

When you’re setting your own SLAs, don’t believe the RPO and
RTO printed on the outside of the box of whatever technology
you’re looking at. And certainly, don’t repeat the RPO and RTO
to the business managers. Test it. Assume that something will
go wrong, and think about how you would address such issues.
(Heck, you can even go to the extreme of thinking that everything
will go wrong and then negotiate with the business managers
back to a point of reality!)

SLAs ARE AS MUCH

ART AS SCIENCE
SLAs can sometimes be more art than science because in order to
have good SLAs that both the IT staff and business management can
be satisfied with takes creative planning, usually by folks who have
suffered an IT outage. Balance must be achieved despite two types of
outlook:

• If the IT team is overly conservative and cautious, they may

set the SLA performance bar so low that the business manage-
ment team believes that the IT staff is unknowledgeable or
low-performing.
• If the IT team is overly optimistic or unrealistic, the SLA perfor-
mance bar may be so high that even well-executed recoveries may
fail to meet the measure established in the SLA.

When negotiating your IT SLA with the business leaders, consider first
leading a brainstorming session with your senior IT folks to map out
the recovery plans: Identify the likely failure points and your mitigat-
ing actions when the plan does break down. Only after you have that
workflow should you talk to the business managers about SLAs.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Risk Analysis (RA)

»» Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

Chapter  2
Operational Metrics:
RA and BIA

C
hapter  1 introduces some of the metrics you can use to
assess what your data protection technologies are. This
chapter looks at how well you can utilize these metrics
within a business operations context. Here, you’ll see how to
apply them to the business as well as how to pay for the technolo-
gies that we believe you need.

Risk Analysis: The Science of Worrying

How likely is it that your particular backup solution will have a
problem?

Perhaps more important, how likely is it that your production

resource will suffer failure? Consider my house in Dallas, Texas.
How likely is it that it will suffer a flood? Or a monsoon? Or an
earthquake? Or a tornado?

Let’s focus on this last question to take technology out of the pro-
cess. It so happens that I live in Dallas, Texas, which is approxi-
mately 400 miles from the nearest large body of water, the Gulf of
Mexico. Because of this, I have no fear of a monsoon. Statistically

CHAPTER 2 Operational Metrics: RA and BIA 15

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 speaking, the likelihood of Dallas being hit by a monsoon is effec-
tively zero. Speaking of water, my home is in a 100-year flood
plain, so, statistically, my land will be flooded once per century.
I could buy flood insurance for my home, but the probability is low
enough that I choose not to. If I lived in Houston, Texas, which is
much closer to the coast, flooding is more likely and I might want
flood insurance. But, because the probability is so much higher,
I probably could not afford it — the insurance actuaries will have
already calculated that fact into any possible premiums.

This has meaning for this discussion. Insurance is an entire

industry built on consumers’ presumptions that they pay a little
every month to avoid a potentially significant and perhaps life-
altering financial impact later. The amount of insurance that’s
paid is based predominantly on two factors:

»» How likely is the crisis that you’re anticipating?

»» What is the financial impact that you’re mitigating?
Concepts such as data protection and data availability are similar
to the idea of buying insurance. First, you assess what could go
wrong and consider how much it will cost if it does, and then
you purchase something that costs appreciably less than that to
­mitigate the crisis.

What could possibly go wrong?

The first step in planning your data protection and availability
strategy is to look at each of the servers and applications in your
environment and think about what could go wrong in what is
­formally referred to as a Risk Analysis (RA).

Go crazy: Think about everything that could possibly go wrong.

The most important rule in this exercise is to simply list every
single thing that could go wrong. Do not think (yet) about the
probability of something occurring, but just the potential of its
occurring. And let yourself think small and think big.

In the case of an application that the organization relies on, you

can’t just consider the application itself. An end user doesn’t care
if the reason he can’t get to his data is that the application crashed
or the OS hung or the hard drive failed or the DNS server isn’t
resolving correctly or Active Directory won’t let anyone log on

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 or the browser isn’t reading the page correctly. Users don’t care
because their data and their productivity are impacted, regardless
of the cause.

That’s from the user’s perspective. Now think about the big
problems. Is your company in a flood zone? If you’re in southern
California, are you near a forest that can catch on fire? If you’re
in northern California, what would an earthquake do? If you’re
in the Midwest, are you in tornado country? In the north, what
would a blizzard do? On the East Coast, how likely is a hurricane?
If you live in Florida, a hurricane is a when, not an if.

Here’s a reality check: Several years ago, I was conducting a dis-

aster recovery seminar in a town in Florida. My opening remark
was this: “According to the National Weather Service, this city is
in the eye of a hurricane every 2.83 years. It has been 3 years since
you have actually been hit. You are past due.” My advice to you?
Be acutely aware of potential disaster situations you may con-
front. Don’t assume that, just because it hasn’t happened yet, it
won’t happen.

How likely is it?

I am not suggesting that every IT professional should turn into an
actuary, someone who lives with the statistics of risk all day long.
What I am suggesting is that when you are first imagining the
entire realm of bad things that could happen to your data, servers,
infrastructure, and even people, first just list them. Then, having
done that, put on your practical hat and consider the reasonable
probability of each one. The reason I don’t buy flood insurance is
because a flood, while possible, is not probable for me. I cannot
buy hail insurance at a reasonable price, because it almost cer-
tainly will happen to me.

In technology, some calamities are certain to happen:

»» You will lose hard drives.

»» System boards will fail.
»» Applications will crash.
»» Databases will become corrupted.
»» Users will accidentally overwrite last month’s data with this
month’s data and then regret it.

CHAPTER 2 Operational Metrics: RA and BIA 17

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 In business, some crises are likely to happen:

»» Someone may steal something — probably a laptop —

from your company.
»» Someone may maliciously delete data on their last day
at work.
»» The server room may catch fire or might be flooded from
the bathroom immediately above it.

In life, natural disasters could affect your company facilities.

So, what is the likelihood of each event you listed? You may not
have exact figures but stack the kinds of things you’re protect-
ing against in relative probability to each other. This risk analysis
(RA) exercise is half of what you need in order to start planning
your data protection and availability plan.

Business Impact Analysis:

How Much Will It Cost?
Data protection and availability aren’t just about technology. In
fact, both are mostly about reducing financial impact. To do that,
you not only need to look at the technologies you can use and
the calamities you fear but also to turn all of them into financial
ramifications.

Let’s look at the potential technology and business crises listed

in the previous section. They’re ordered approximately from
most likely to least likely, with the exception of end users who
­accidentally overwrite precious data. (I guarantee that users will
overwrite data.) Let’s look at the two extremes of the list. Every-
thing else falls between them, from a likelihood perspective as
well as financial impact:

»» Scenario 1: If I were to lose one hard drive within a production

device, the physical costs are likely a few hundred dollars or
less. Whether the lost hard drive was for a data drive or the
operating system will determine the level of lost productivity,
which is then compounded by the number of users affected.
And, how long since my last backup will determine the amount
of lost data that I may or may not have to re-create.

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 »» Scenario 2: On the other end of the list, if my production
facility were to be flooded, the entire server room — as
well as many other production resources, desktops,
infrastructure components, and even copy machines
and coffee makers — would be destroyed. My business
could be down for days and, in fact, might never reopen.

The goal of a business impact analysis (BIA) is to financially

quantify what the cost of each type of crisis might be. Say you
calculate that the total cost of a hard drive failure, lost produc-
tivity, and replacement is $1,000. You believe that it’s a highly
likely event, so you need to aggressively seek a data protection
or availability solution that mitigates that $1,000 of impact to
the business by finding a mitigation solution that costs less than
$1,000 — ­hopefully, a lot less. Similarly, though you may believe
that a flood would cost $3 million, it’s admittedly far less likely
than a hard drive failure. That statistical probability factors into
determining what you might spend to mitigate that risk.

Always Turn Technologies into Dollars

Most often, the person who writes the checks  — particularly
the checks for buying new assets like software and ­hardware —
doesn’t care about RPO and RTO or about backups versus snapshots
or about disk versus tape versus cloud. To move ­business-driven
decision makers forward on data protection projects, always
quantify the risk or the reward in dollars, not terabytes, minutes,
or subjective assessments.

Data-protection and -availability projects are among the ­easiest

topics to describe in financial terms. Availability — or, put another
way, productivity, — can be calculated by looking at the cost of
downtime. Protection and recoverability can be quantified based
on the impact of lost data as it relates not only to lost productivity
but also to the inability to comply with applicable regulatory
compliance mandates.

In short, if you can objectively state that one hour of downtime

equates to $10,000 and the solution to resolve it costs $800, then
it is easy to justify new data protection or availability solutions.

Chapter 3 covers exactly that topic: How to calculate the cost of

downtime.

CHAPTER 2 Operational Metrics: RA and BIA 19

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Examining the intangible impacts of
downtime and data loss

»» Calculating the cost of downtime with

four simple variables

»» Applying the cost-of-downtime formula

in the real world

»» Adapting the cost-of-downtime formula

to your organization

Chapter  3
Calculating the Cost
of Downtime

E
veryone “knows” that downtime and data loss are bad,
though most don’t know how to quantify it. Figure 3-1 shows
industry research on what are the top concerns by senior
leaders related to downtime and data loss.

Even so, you actually can quantify some of the impact in a way
that helps bridge the dialogue between technical circumstances
and operational realities.

CHAPTER 3 Calculating the Cost of Downtime 21

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 Source: ESG Real World SLAs and Availability Methods, December 2017

FIGURE 3-1: The intangible impacts of downtime.

Taking a Look at Four Simple Variables

The main idea when quantifying downtime costs is how to turn
technology problems into financial problems. If you can fiscally
quantify the impact that something has on the business, then you
can have a different kind of discussion with business (and budget)
leaders on why you need to fix it. To start that conversation, you
need to understand the cost of downtime. In other words, when a
server breaks, how much does it cost the company?

If a server fails, you have to look backward as well as forward in

order to calculate the impact. Figure 3-2 shows a server failing at
2 p.m. on a Wednesday.

In this first example, you make these three assumptions:

»» The business day is exactly 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

»» You have a successful backup from Tuesday night that is
restorable.

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 »» The server will be fixed by the end of the next business day
(Thursday).

FIGURE 3-2: Downtime, forward and backward.

With these assumptions in mind, two kinds of time can be quanti-

fied: time of lost data and outage time. The next few sections look
at the two kinds more closely.

Lost data
If a server fails, any new data since the last recoverable backup is
potentially lost. Since the server failed at 2 p.m. on Wednesday
and you’re assuming a reliable restore from a successful backup
on Tuesday night, you can presume that you will lose whatever
data was changed between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

In Figure 3-2, the arrow starts at the time of the server failure and
points backward to the left to whenever the last successful backup
can be reliably restored from — in this case, the previous evening.

If the last backup had failed or was not able to be restored, the
arrow would point further to the left until a successful backup
could be restored. But, for now, data loss is quantified at six busi-
ness hours. Therefore, the formula would look like this:

Td = Time of lost data, which is six hours in this case

You’re quantifying lost data in a measurement of time because, in

the basic example, you’re assuming that if the end users took six
hours to originally create the data, then they will likely consume
roughly another six hours of business time to recreate the data.

CHAPTER 3 Calculating the Cost of Downtime 23

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 Outage time
Because the server failed in the afternoon, you’re assuming that
the end users may be idle for the remainder of the day and (in the
example) idle for the whole next business day.

In Figure 3-2, this arrow starts at the time of the server failure

and points forward to the right until the server is completely back
online, which in this case is the end of the next business day.
If this is true, the outage time is the remaining three hours of
Wednesday afternoon plus all nine business hours of Thursday.
The formula here looks like this:

To = Time of outage or lost productivity, which is 12 hours

in the example

You can say that, added together, To + Td = 12 + 6. So, the total time
impact of the server failure is 18 hours.

Now you need to decide how much those 18 hours are worth in
dollars. Again, there are two kinds of $-per-hour costs to con-
sider: human costs and profitability. Let me tackle the human
costs first.

Human costs
If you presume that an end user is completely idle while the IT
resources are offline, then the company is essentially paying the
salary or hourly wage of that person for no benefit. That can be
quantified this way:

Hr = Hourly cost of impacted personnel ($ per hour)

In a restaurant that is unable to do any business, you might reduce

its losses by sending the waiters and cooks home for the day. But
if 15 hourly staff members who each cost the company $8 per
hour (along with two salaried managers paid $40,000 annually,
or $20 per hour) were to sit idle, then (15 × $8) + (2 × $20) = $160
per hour for idle time.

In an office, perhaps there are other activities the employees can

do so that they aren’t completely idle, but simply impacted. In that
case, you might choose to divide the salaried costs in half to show
that they’re half-impacted as opposed to idle and nonproductive.

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 Every business is different, but you should be able to assess a
$-per-hour number for some percentage of your hard costs of
paying people who are unable to perform their primary role due
to an IT outage.

Profitability
When a team that creates revenue is affected, revenue is affected.
So, if you know the weekly or monthly profitability of a team, you
can quantify how much profit they’re generating, or not generat-
ing, during an outage:

Pr = Hourly profitability or loss ($ per hour)

A team may produce $9,000 per day in profit, so their hourly

profitability between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. is $1,000 per hour.

On a team that is subject to service contracts, you may be liable

for fines or recouped losses if you aren’t offering your service.

A shipping department may not lose any money for a few hours of
downtime, but if an entire day is lost, expedited shipping charges
may be incurred in order to make timely deliveries the next day.

Again, every business is different, but you should be able to assess

a $-per-hour for the business value that a team creates per day
or per hour. Some of that productivity is lost or penalties incurred
when the team is unable to perform their primary role due to an
IT outage.

Adding together Hr and Pr gives you the total dollars per hour
impact that an IT outage has on the team. Using the first exam-
ple from each description, a team may cost $160 per hour by sit-
ting idle (Hr) and also not create revenue (Pr) at $1,000 per hour.
Thus, every hour is worth $1,160 to the company.

Applying the Formula in the Real World

In this section, I present a basic formula for measuring systems
availability in financial terms. You can take the total time for data
loss plus outage time and multiply it by how much an hour is

CHAPTER 3 Calculating the Cost of Downtime 25

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 worth to the business or team in consideration of human costs as
well as profitability or losses:

Cost of downtime = (To + Td) × (Hr + Pr)

To = Time, length of outage

Td = Time, length of data loss
Hr = Human cost $/hr (per person)
Pr = Profitability $/hr

In the examples, this would be

To = 12 hour outage
Td = 6 hours of lost data
Hr = $160/hour for the team to sit idle
Pr = $1,000/hour in lost revenue

Cost of downtime = (12 hours + 6 hours) × ($160/hour + $1,000/

hour)

Cost of downtime = 18 hours × $1,160/hour

Cost of downtime = $20,880

This company will lose nearly $21,000 if a server fails, even if it’s
recoverable by the end of the next day.

So you now have a formula, but more work must be done. The
idea here is simply to help identify the variables that you’ll need
in order to quantify the cost of downtime.

Calculating downtime costs for

just one group or workload
It’s time to explore a bit more how the (rather abstract) formula
functions in the real world. You’re still considering the same out-
age scenario of an environment that is using nightly backup that
includes a full backup every weekend and incremental backups
every night. Consistent with the scenario you’ve used in this
chapter, the production server fails at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. As
discussed earlier in this chapter, users are affected for the rest
of Wednesday, and the recovery takes a good part of Thursday.
By the end of Thursday, the server is running, the users are
mostly happy, and business resumes. Two months from now, that

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 incident will be thought of from long-term memory as a minor
blip. Yes, the server went down, but everything resumed within a
day. Pretty good, right?

Wrong. Let’s look at the numbers:

Cost of downtime = (To + Td) × (Hr + Pr)

To = Time, length of outage

Td = Time, length of data loss
Hr = Human cost $/hour (for team)
Pr = Profitability $/hour

Nightly backup = (1d + ½d) × (Hr + Pr) × hrs/day

To = RTO = 1 day recovery, including parts, shipping, and

installation
Td = RPO = average ½ day (could fail early morning or late
afternoon)
Hr = Human cost $/hour (per person)
Pr = Profitability $/hour

The time of outage (To) or recovery time objective (RTO) will

likely be one business day, which includes identifying why the
server failed, repairing those components, and restoring the data.
If everything goes well, this should typically be one business day.
If things don’t go well, this might measure two or three days of
downtime. In a perfect world, additional parts are already stand-
ing by, technicians are ready to go, and perhaps the server is up
in just a few hours.

The time of data loss (Td) or recovery point objective (RPO) is

statistically probable as one-half of a business day. As discussed
earlier in the chapter, the server could fail at the beginning of a
business day, resulting in near zero data loss since the last nightly
backup, or it could fail at the end of the business day, resulting in
a complete day of data loss. Splitting the difference, assume that
data is lost from half of the day.

Assume that the outage impacts just one division within a larger
organization, perhaps the inside sales team within the company.
Various surveys presume that the average white-collar worker in
the United States costs $36 per hour. The reality of a statistic this
broad is that it’s guaranteed to be wrong for your workforce, but it

CHAPTER 3 Calculating the Cost of Downtime 27

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 serves as a placeholder for now. Now, presume a 10-hour workday
and that this team generates $10 million in revenue annually:

Cost of downtime = (To + Td) × (Hr + Pr)

To = Time, length of outage

Td = Time, length of data loss
Hr = Human cost $/hour (for team)
Pr = Profitability $/hour

Inside Sales Team whose data is protected via nightly

backup = (To + Td) × (Hr + Pr) × hrs/day

To = RTO = 1-day recovery, including parts, shipping, and install

Td = RPO = average ½ day (could fail early a.m. vs. late p.m.)
Hr = Human cost = $36/hour/person × 50 employees = $1,800/
hour
Pr = Profitability = $10M annually = $3,850/hour (10-hour
workday, 5-day workweek)

Inside Sales Team whose data is protected via nightly

backup = (1d + ½d) × (1800 + 3850) × 10 hrs/day

Business Impact per Server Outage = $84,750

This is not a typographical error. If the primary server fails for an

average group of 50 office employees that creates revenue (all of
your earlier presumptions), then the business impact to that
organization is $84,750.

Adapting the formula to your business

Crunching the numbers is the first step. To be fair, though, this
isn’t the whole story. The likely outcome of first evaluating the
cost-of-downtime formula is that management will disagree with
its validity. And that is fine, because they are probably correct.

If your users cannot get to their primary application, they might

catch up on email, or they might have some documents on their
local workstations or laptops. In this case, assume that the
employees aren’t completely idle but are simply affected. If that
were the case, you might add a multiplier to the formula to imply
that the user base is operating at two-thirds efficiency. If so, a
one-third multiplier against the formula results in a business
impact of only $28,250.

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 In today’s world of information workers, you might presume that
the users have a variety of activities to perform. Between email
and database applications (including contact management), as
well as traditional office applications from a file server, perhaps
you could presume only a minor inconvenience to a percentage
of the users. Perhaps this results in a 10% impact to 10% of the
employees. Literally, this would mean that only five of the 50
employees had any impact, and therefore the cost would be only
$8,475.

But some departments don’t have multiple functions that they

can balance. In the example of inside sales, what if all of the data
were within a single database application or the sales folks funda-
mentally could not operate without access to the database? In that
case, they would suffer the whole (and what may have originally
seemed extreme) business impact of $84,750.

The business impact may be even higher when you recognize that
a server doesn’t usually go down just once. Although these minor
inconveniences may fade in the memory of users, they typically
don’t fade from your system’s event log. You might be surprised
to find that a particular server fails twice per year, in which case
you would double all the previous numbers (which still don’t
include hardware or services costs).

Statistically, 18% of servers will have at least one outage per year.
But even at one failure per year, if you presume that a typical
server asset is expected to have a three-year lifespan, then you
should multiply the per-outage cost times the number of outages
per year times the number of years the resource will be in service:

Total Cost per Server = Co × Opy × LS

Co = Cost per Outage = the result of the earlier formula

Opy = Number of Outages per year (presume only 18% per year
and one outage per server)
LS = Expected Lifespan of Server (typically 3 years)

Total Cost per Server = $84,750 × 0.18/yr × 3 = $45,765

Here’s the punchline: The server that has been recently purchased
and deployed to service the inside sales team of the company is
considered reliable and well managed, so it’s presumed to have

CHAPTER 3 Calculating the Cost of Downtime 29

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 an  18% chance of failing at least once each year. Note that by
­adding statistical likelihood to the equation, you’re now d­ ealing
with a probability, not a possibility (that is to say when, not if).
With that in mind, the company should plan on that server’s
impact to the business being $45,765 over its lifetime of service.

That is the business impact analysis (BIA) for this one server.
It took a while in this chapter to break it down, but in real life,
the BIA goes quicker than you might expect. Essentially, as you’re
looking at what kind of protection or availability solutions you
might consider per server or application platform, you first need
to understand what kind of risks you’re protecting against as well
as the financial impact if one such risk were to occur.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Total cost of investment (TCO)

»» Return on investment (ROI)

»» You should hope that they argue with

your formulas

Chapter  4
Financial Metrics:
TCO and ROI

S
ure, you can discuss data protection and availability tech-
nologies in terms of cost of impact, meaning the business cost
of the status-quo. There is, of course, the factor of price of
solution, which is different depending on whom you’re talking to.

Total Cost of Ownership

In this section, I want to recognize the fact that the price is always
more than what is printed on the invoice. In fact, in many backup-
and-recovery scenarios, the greatest contributing cost is labor.

Let’s consider a traditional nightly backup solution. The initial

acquisition costs might include

Backup server (software) $2,500

Backup agents (software) $995 per production server
Backup server (hardware) $2,500
Tape backup drive (hardware) $2,000

CHAPTER 4 Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI 31

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 If you assume a traditional midsize company network with
25  servers, then to purchase a nightly backup solution for this
environment, you might be requesting $37,000, not including
deployment services.

Not including the labor for deployment is your first mistake

because you will “pay” for deployment even if you do it your-
self. If you contract a local reseller or backup specialist, there’s
likely a fixed cost for the deployment, which hopefully also results
in a fast-and-reliable solution, because presumably the reseller
has previous experience and close ties with your backup software
vendor. If you go the DIY route because you don’t want to pony
up for the additional labor costs, you will pay for it in time  —
literally. (Anyone who has ever completed a significant home
improvement project can attest to this fact.) Your own IT staff,
who would otherwise be doing other projects, will be deploying
this instead. The project will likely take longer if your staff has
not deployed this particular technology before, and, if they’re not
following best practices, it’s sure to result in additional labor at
a later date.

In any event, presuming that everything is equal, assume eight

hours for the server deployment plus 30 minutes per production
server for agent installation and backup-scripts configuration.
Splitting the difference between an in-house IT professional at
$75 per hour and a local reseller, which might charge $250 per
hour, this results in 20 hours, which you could equate at approxi-
mately $150 per hour, or an additional $3,000 total labor.

But you aren’t done yet. You should also calculate the cost of
media. If you assume that each of the servers has 5TB of storage,
then you would have 125TB of active storage across the environ-
ment. At an average 60% utilization rate, you would need approx-
imately 75TB of data to be protected. With an aggregate daily
change rate of 5% (more for applications, less on file shares),
you’ll be writing about 4TB of new data per day. Backups can be
stored on disk, in the cloud, or within tapes. Using tapes for this
example, most backup software will use a different tape for each
daily job, plus four weekly tapes and 12 annual tapes. Conser-
vatively, this puts you at 20 tapes at $100 each for an additional
$2,000 in tape media (not including additional costs, like offsite
storage or services).

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 You still aren’t done. There will also be ongoing costs, such as
power, space, and cooling. Space would be associated with your
facilities costs, but simply running the new backup software on
a commodity server platform might use 500 watts (plus the tape
drive’s 200 watts). The monthly power cost for this server alone is

700 Watts × 24 hours per day = 16,800 Watt Hours (WH) or

16.8 Kilowatt Hours (KWH) per day

16.8 KWH × 30 days in a month = 520.8 KWH per month

At $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, this server will cost $31.20 per month,
or $375 per year. You also need to add in the ongoing labor costs
for these tasks:

»» Rotating the tapes daily, which isn’t a lot, but perhaps

10 minutes per business day
»» Checking the backup jobs, 10 minutes per business day,
plus one -hour error resolution every two weeks

Those aren’t significant numbers when looked at that way, but

when you add them up, you see 8,220 minutes, or 137 hours,
or 3.4 working weeks per year, just managing backups (assuming
that most things work correctly most of the time) and not includ-
ing restores. The labor for managing backups in this environment
will consume at least a month of every year with no productivity
benefit and will cost $10,300.

This gives you the bigger picture, the total cost of ownership
(TCO):

»» Initial purchase: The initial purchase price of your backup

solution might be $37,000, plus $3,000 to install it.
»» Additional costs: The operational costs in the first year will
be an additional $12,800.
»» Extended over its service life: Assuming that most
hardware and software assets have a presumed lifespan
of three years, you can add software maintenance (15%),
upgrade labor (half of deployment), and new annual plus
daily tapes (five annually) for the second and third years.
The ongoing costs for them are $6,100 annually.

CHAPTER 4 Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI 33

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 Thus, the TCO for this backup solution would be $65,000, which
is nearly double the initial purchase price and doesn’t include the
labor for any restores.

Return on Investment
If TCO is thought of as the bad number to consider in any financial
assessment, then return on investment (ROI) would be the good
one. Think back to the beginning of Chapter 2 on business impact
analysis (BIA), where we ask, “How much does the ­problem cost?”

If a problem costs $150,000, you should consider that amount

as quantifiably lost money. But if you solve the problem, the
­company gets $150,000 back. Think of it like an ante in poker or
a coin dropped into a slot machine: That money is gone. If you
make any money from poker or slots, then that is winnings  —
a positive. Of course, if you bet $5 and then later win $5, you
haven’t actually won  — you’ve broken even. Similarly, if your
technology ­problem or vulnerability costs $150,000 and you get
it back by spending $150,000 on a protection solution, then you
haven’t actually solved the problem of losing the money for the
business  — you’ve just chosen to spend it in a different way.
That may be okay to your CFO, based on accounting practices, but
that’s outside the scope of this book.

If you spent $65,000 (TCO) to solve a problem that will cost the
company $150,000 (BIA), then you have solved the ­problem.
You literally added $85,000 to the company’s bottom line
­profitability because it otherwise would have lost those dollars
due to the outages you mitigated. This is where ROI comes into
the ­picture  — how much you saved or gained for the company,
in comparison to the amount you had to spend to accomplish it.

Calculating ROI
You can quantify ROI in different ways:

»» Think about it as savings, where you save the company

$85,000 versus its existing costs. Taking servers completely
out of the discussion, if you could show your accounting
manager that she’s used to spending $150,000 per year on
something but you could save her $85,000 by doing it a
different way, it’s usually an easy business decision.

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 »» Measure it as the percentage of BIA/TCO. In this case,
$150,000 divided by $65,000 yields 2.3 — or a 230 percent
yield. Others invert the percentage (TCO/BIA) as the percent-
age of the problem you’re spending to solve it. In this case,
you can spend 43% of the problem to resolve it. That also
means that you save 57% of your projected losses.
»» Think in terms of payback windows (time). If a problem
costs $150,000 over the three-year lifespan of the asset, then
consider how long into that window before the solution pays
for itself. In this case, with an average of $50,000 costs
annually, the first-year cost of $52,800 is basically breaking
even, but the second and third years go from $50,000 to
$6,000 annually, saving almost everything.

The actual calculation for ROI is to take the net gain ($150,000
minus the costs of $65,000) of $85,000 and then divide it by
the costs, after which you can multiply it by 100 to arrive at a
percentage:

(Total Gain – Costs) ÷ Costs

($150,000 – $65,000) ÷ $65,000

$85,000 ÷ $65,000 = 1.31, which is 131% ROI

TIME TO VALUE
Somewhat related to the ROI of a solution is how quickly you will start
to see the benefits of the solution you’re deploying. When considering
that you will see x dollars over the lifespan of the project, look also at
when you will see those dollars.

Compare when the costs are to be incurred to when the savings will
start to be realized. Will you just break even for the first year and then
see gains in the second and third years (such as when you deploy a
new component that will solve an ongoing problem)? Or will you see
gains the first year but fewer gains in later years, as you postpone a
problem or take on incremental costs throughout the project?

How else you might use (and grow) the earlier money can also affect
the overall costs for the project.

CHAPTER 4 Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI 35

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 Any positive ROI is a relatively good decision, and any negative
ROI is a relatively poor decision. Consider a $10 problem:

»» Spending $6 to solve a $10 problem is good because

($10 – $6) ÷ $6 = $4 ÷ $6 = 0.66, or 66% ROI. Said another
way, for every $1 that you spend in this way, you would get
it back as well as an additional 66 cents.
»» Spending $9 to solve a $10 problem is not as good because
($10 – $9) ÷ $9 = $1 ÷ $9 = 0.11, or 11% ROI. Said another
way, for every $1 you spend in this way, you would gain
only an additional 11 cents. There are likely other ways that
the business could invest that dollar and gain more than
11 cents in return.
»» Spending $12 to solve a $10 problem is obviously not a
good idea: ($10 – $12) ÷ $12 = a negative 12% ROI. Said
another way, for every $1 you spend, you lose 12 more
cents than what the original problem was already costing.
It would (obviously) be cheaper to live with the $10 problem
than to solve it for $12.

The third example may be overly obvious, but sometimes IT

administrators do solve $10 backup or availability problems with
$12 solutions (improperly utilized cloud services, for example)
because they don’t understand the BIA or TCO well enough or they
aren’t aware of the $6 alternative solutions.

Determining which ROI method

is the most accurate
This book talks about converting technology issues into
­quantitative  — and specifically financial  — assessments. After
you have converted your protection or availability problem and
potential solution(s) into this financial language, you can convert
it from one denomination (ROI metric) to another as easily as
converting the denominator of a fraction by multiplying or divid-
ing it by a common number.

One of the reasons that I prefer to deal in actual dollars is because

CFOs and other accounting types can often crunch the numbers to
their own liking, once you present two key numeric facts (though
they must be defensible facts and not subjective opinions):

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 »» The problem is currently costing the company $XX,XXX. (BIA)
»» I can solve the problem by spending $YY,YYY. (TCO)
From there, you might subtract one from the other for savings,
or you might find a ratio that helps you appreciate it. However,
based on some anecdotal findings from surveys and the experi-
ence of many years in supporting sales efforts, there is a credibil-
ity concern to be aware of. The next section explores that concern.

Examining the credibility

challenge of ROI
Notwithstanding the recognition that every technology vendor
(or other sales organization) always preaches how wonderful its
widget is and how amazing its ROI (often unfounded) could be,
ROI can have a credibility challenge.

Using the percentage ROI method, assume that the ROI of a solu-
tion is 43 percent: You’re spending $70 to solve a problem that
costs $100. The challenge is that the solution is costing over half
of what the problem costs. That means that if your assessment
of the cost of the problem is perceived as too high (qualitatively,
not necessarily quantitatively) or that you may have underesti-
mated something in your TCO, then the ROI goes down from 43%
as costs start getting closer to what the problem itself costs. If
your CFO is willing to wager that a problem won’t happen as often
as you project, she might actually save money (or at least break
even) by just allowing the problem to happen  — hopefully less
often than you expect it to. The project doesn’t have enough ROI
to warrant the initial expenditure.

On the other hand, what if you need to spend only $5 to save $100,
resulting in a 1,900% ROI? This situation presents the oppo-
site challenge: It sounds too good to be true. If you have a good
amount of credibility with the financial decision maker, then you
will be seen as a hero and your project will be approved (although
with that much credibility between you and your CFO, you may
not have calculated a specific ROI to begin with). For the rest of
us in reality-land, if it sounds too good to be true, some financial
decision makers will assume that it is not true (or isn’t viable as a
“legitimate” solution). There must be some significant cost ­factor
that is either drastically inflated in the problem or underestimated

CHAPTER 4 Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI 37

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 in the solution. Either way, the solution is not perceived as cred-
ible. After all, how likely is it that you can purchase a mere toy to
solve a real problem?

Here is a rule of thumb that at first glance looks goofy:

25 percent ROI may be better than 60 percent ROI.

Based on anecdotes, experience, and a few old surveys, it appears

that 20% to 25% ROI is the best way to justify a solution. The gain
is enough that the solution is likely worth pursuing, though the
investment is substantive enough that the solution can be consid-
ered reasonable for addressing the issue. Using this approach, you
might consider the following ROI boundaries:

»» Over 40% may lack credibility or legitimacy.

»» Under 15% may not offer enough potential gain.
One of the most interesting pieces of advice that I ever heard
related to ROI was from someone at a CFO conference who attended
a session on ROI.  They heard that if a significant ­proposal was
submitted for review and it had a TCO projection and ROI analysis
on its first submission, it would be approved over 40% more often
than those that did not have those calculations. If the same type
of proposal were pushed back down to get the TCO/ROI analysis
and it was resubmitted, it had only a 15% greater likelihood of
approval over similar projects without one. Here’s the first ROI
success tip: Present the TCO and ROI assessment with the initial
proposal because it not only clarifies the legitimacy of the project
to you but also proactively clears a big hurdle for you with those
who guard the dollars.

You Should Hope They Argue

with Your Formulas
The best thing that can happen when you present your meth-
odology and resulting BIA/TCO/ROI justifications for a project is
that the business/operational/financial stakeholder challenges
your formula (in a constructive way). When working with your

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 business leaders and establishing the formula you will use in your
process, here are a few key ideas to frame the conversation:

»» Working backward, ROI is just a comparison of BIA to TCO.

»» TCO is simply a prospective invoice, along with some simple
assumptions of fixed costs. It is likely that any challenges
here will result in minor tweaks to the fixed values, not
wholesale changes to the math.
»» BIA is where challenges are most likely to occur — your
business stakeholders and dependents don’t agree with
how you calculated the cost of downtime. (See the example
in Chapter 3.) This is great news because then the group
gets to decide why the formula doesn’t apply to a particular
business unit or technology resource.

If your discussion circle can collectively agree that when the data-
base server is down for as long as a day, employees can catch
up on email, or vice versa (and thereby reduce some variable by
half), then the collective team has turned your formula into their
formula.

If the HR person can provide more specific hourly dollar values

across a large department (though you’re unlikely to get a list of
individual salaries), your team now has much more accurate fixed
values that both the IT management and the operational manage-
ment will agree on.

In short, every pushback that can be discussed or refined brings

buy-in and agreement by the other parties. When you have five
variables to work with, the formula may seem academic. But if
you get more accurate modifiers and the dollar variables are filled
in with real numbers, you’re left with only the technology num-
bers, such as these:

»» How often does the server go down?

»» What is the cost of replacement hardware?
»» How much do tapes cost?
These numbers are usually easily accessible by IT management,
so completing the equation should pose no problem. From there,
you now have a new BIA that is even more defensible and that
now has credibility in the eyes of the other stakeholders.

CHAPTER 4 Financial Metrics: TCO and ROI 39

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 TCO comes from the invoice and projections. ROI is simply the
mathematical comparison of the BIA and the TCO.

But now, because everyone has weighed in on the financial values

and the relational impact of the formula, everyone believes the
ROI, no matter how big or small. Going back to the concern you
had around presumed credibility of the ROI formula:

»» If the ROI is less appealing (for example, TCO is 50 percent

of BIA), at least everyone was involved in understanding the
legitimacy of the numbers, and you have a greater likelihood
of their agreeing to the project.
»» If the ROI is too appealing (not emotionally credible), you
have the simpler problem of working with the vendor
through side meetings to educate your stakeholder peers
as to the legitimacy of the solution and the higher potential
of being that hero by spending $10 to save $100.

Either way, having the initial formulas and variables challenged

turns the project from yours to theirs and will help you pay for
what you already know you want.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER:
»» Talking more

»» Keeping the conversation going

Chapter  5
Ten Keys to Better
Conversations

W
e finish the book in the same way we started it  — by
recognizing that metrics on downtime and data loss
may be expressed in terms of either IT technologies,
operational concerns, or financial impacts. Keeping all three balls
in the air may seem daunting, but the trick is simply to under-
stand the audience(s) involved and to translate the numbers from
one set of metrics to another.

Start with More Conversations

For any given business process, there are several different stake-
holders. The conversations should start with the three key groups:
IT technologists, business unit leaders, and financial leaders. After
you’ve translated the business processes into both financial impacts
and required IT dependencies, then there are more contributors
to be invited: application ­owners, infrastructure architects, legal/
compliance, and executive sponsors. Yes, this sounds like a lot of
work, but getting them talking ­upfront will rapidly accelerate solu-
tion selection and the purchasing workflow as well as increasing
overall organizational satisfaction with the resulting outcome.

CHAPTER 5 Ten Keys to Better Conversations 41

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 Get Your SLAs Right the First Time
Starting SLA discussions with an assessment of current IT technol-
ogy inevitably limits your imagination and may reduce your open-
ness to consider what the business units need for assured uptime or
data protection. Instead, first consider the business requirements
and then assess your IT capabilities as they relate to satisfying them.

Realize Backup Admins Rarely Make

Good Disaster Recovery Planners
Every business continuity/disaster recovery strategy includes
an assured capability to recover data. But it would be a mistake
to assume that a backup administrator has the breadth of skills
necessary to assess the business processes and financial impacts
necessary to frame out IT’s portion of such a strategy. But if you
turn that argument around, by learning how to have discussions
on operational requirements and financial considerations, you’re
no longer “just” a backup admin.

Quantify IT Challenges in Operational

and Financial Impacts
The only people who care about RPO and RTO for their own sakes
are backup admins and data protection vendors. For everyone
else, downtime should be measured in capabilities and impacts
instead of speeds and feeds. This doesn’t diminish the impor-
tance of measuring the uptime and frequency-of-protection of
IT  ­systems. But it should change the vocabulary and taxonomy
that you as an IT professional use to articulate the imperatives
associated with modernizing your data protection strategy.

Recognize That There is a Huge

Cost in Doing Nothing
If you haven’t gotten buy-in in all three languages on the impor-
tance of a robust data protection strategy, you’ll likely hear

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 comments such as, “We can’t afford to do anything more right
now.” But that’s like complaining that you can’t focus on the
water bill while staring at a broken faucet with water gushing out.
Server outages are occurring in your environment today, which
means that you’re experiencing some level of downtime and data
loss today. And, thanks to ­Chapter 3, you can calculate what that
data loss is costing the business today. ­Investing in better data
protection and recoverability is far cheaper than continuing to pay
for lost productivity caused by downtime and data loss.

Acknowledge That Downtime

Costs More Than You Think
Most people think about downtime as an inconvenience because
they haven’t put numbers to it. So put numbers to it. If you start
the conversation with the conceptual view of the formula in
Chapter 3, you can reduce the four variables to two, by converting
Hr (human costs) and Pr (profitability), plus any relevant fines or
other ad hoc charges. At this point, the remaining two variables
can be owned by IT, whereby you can check systems or manage-
ment logs to count outages, lengths of each outage, and practical
recovery times to return to service.

Make Sure Your Stakeholders

Argue with Your Formulas
The best part of any discussion on the formula from Chapter 3 is
when an operations or finance person says, “That doesn’t really
compute because of X.” For example, if a CRM system goes down,
maybe the sales teams aren’t sitting idle (completely unproduc-
tive, in other words) but are instead encumbered. At that point,
ask “How encumbered are they? Are they half as productive? One-
third as productive? What number can you give me?” That num-
ber then becomes a multiplier of Hr or Pr. The great news is that
now your formula becomes the team’s formula. They’re now bought
in on the formula’s validity in quantifying downtime costs.

CHAPTER 5 Ten Keys to Better Conversations 43

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 Don’t Forget the Soft Costs
Not every impact to downtime or data loss has a defensibly
­calculable numeric value. And yet, impacts such as brand dilu-
tion due to bad reputations, or employee morale due to unreliable
systems, absolutely matter. For some organizations, the “soft”
costs are the tipping point between an uncomfortable hard cost
calculation and a decision to make improvements. Admittedly, the
higher up the organization leadership you go, the more you may
find that the soft costs are the actual motivation and that the hard
calculations are needed to help justify the purchase. Either way,
don’t forget to capture the soft cost impacts while you’re gaining
consensus on the hard cost formulas and calculations.

Embrace the Fact That Regulations

Are Your Friend
Regulations are often filled with the minutia of jargon, unre-
alistic mandates, and random hype that gets everyone excited,
even though few people, if any, actually take the time to read
the documents themselves. That said, regulations often have the
side benefit of raising exposure among senior leadership: After
the midlevel managers (or higher) have discussed the technical,
operational, and financial considerations, they will very likely find
executive sponsors who are more motivated to champion change
if those changes also help with compliance to the regulation(s)
that the organization is being held to.

Get Your Data Out of the Building

Too many organizations begin their processes with meetings,
surveys, and other administrative tasks, but their data remains
insufficiently protected ­throughout the process. Later, they have
a disastrous outage, and nothing survived except a big binder of
plans that hadn’t been acted on (yet). Instead, get your data out
of the building. Ensure that your data is survivable, even if the
current solution isn’t particularly elegant or doesn’t match how
you’ll likely deploy at some future date within a more modern
data protection architecture. But at least this way you’ll have a
chance of getting what you need if disaster strikes while you’re
still in the early stages. So get your data out of the building.

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