Backup Vendor Consolidation and How It Impacts Security

Data backups are crucial for business continuity and success. It’s not unusual for a company to use solutions from several backup vendors to meet their varying needs. It’s also not unusual for IT organizations to consider backup vendor consolidation.

There are pros and cons to this approach, including security risks. Learn how backup vendor diversification mitigates these risks and enables innovative defense strategies.

What is Backup Vendor Consolidation?

Backup vendor consolidation is the process of reducing the number of backup solution providers you use. Like other types of technology vendor consolidation, its goal is to centralize processes under fewer vendors or even one vendor. 

Companies that consider consolidating typically do so to simplify management and improve operational efficiency. They also hope to gain cost savings by reducing licensing fees, support costs, and, when applicable, hardware investments.

Pros and Cons of Backup Vendor Consolidation

While there are clear advantages to backup vendor consolidation, it also introduces significant challenges. It’s imperative that you understand both the pros and cons.

Pros

Simplified Management

Consolidating backup vendors reduces the complexity of managing multiple systems and contracts. By centralizing operations, IT teams can streamline workflows and focus on strategic IT initiatives rather than troubleshooting disparate systems. This enhances overall operational efficiency and reduces the administrative burden on IT personnel.

Cost Savings

One of the primary benefits of consolidation is cost savings. By using a single backup vendor, organizations can leverage economies of scale through bulk purchasing. You may have better success at negotiating terms. You also eliminate redundant licensing fees and support contracts.

Improved Compliance and Reporting

Managing compliance can be more straightforward with a centralized solution. You benefit from consistent data protection practices and standardized reporting. If you can simplify audit trails and have detailed, intuitive reports, you’ll be able to enhance transparency and more easily demonstrate compliance during audits or regulatory reviews.

Enhanced Vendor Relationships

Consolidation can foster stronger vendor relationships, as you concentrate your spend with one vendor. If that vendor sees your company as a significant, VIP customer, they may be more responsive and provide higher-quality support, not to mention better service level agreements (SLAs).

Centralized Control

Centralizing backup operations can make it easier to control data protection policies and procedures. IT administrators can implement unified security measures and backup protocols across the organization. 

Cons

Single Point of Failure

One significant drawback of consolidation is the creation of a single point of failure. If you rely on a single backup vendor, any disruption or failure in their infrastructure could impact your entire organization and all your applications and data. For instance, what happens if that vendor experiences a data breach or a prolonged outage due to a system failure or natural disaster? You could experience extensive downtime, loss of critical data, and severe operational disruptions across all your systems being protected by that singular backup vendor. 

Increased Attack Surface

Centralizing backups with one backup vendor expands your organization’s attack surface for cyber threats exponentially. A breach targeting the consolidated backup solution could result in wide-scale data loss or manipulation — compromising a plethora of sensitive and personally identified information such as customer data, intellectual property, and financial records. 

To combat this heightened exposure, you’d need to implement even more rigorous cybersecurity measures, such as encryption, access controls, intrusion detection systems, and continuous monitoring. In order to mitigate risks, regular vulnerability and risk assessments as well as proactive threat intelligence gathering are critical. However, with cybercriminals becoming ever-more sophisticated, it’s unlikely you could truly eliminate the risks of an increased attack surface.

A recent backup vendor breach illustrates this perfectly. In 2023, California law firm Mastagni Holstedt experienced a major outage that caused them to lose connectivity to their systems and data. A cybercriminal organization then made a ransomware demand to reinstate their access. Mastagni tried to avoid this by accessing their backup data but found it had all been deleted. Their backup vendor had been breached. The law firm was forced to pay the attacker in order to regain access to their data. They’re now suing the backup vendor, as well as their MSP. The firm itself may also be liable for potential suits by their own customers.  

Vendor Lock-In

Relying solely on a single vendor’s enterprise backup solution may lead to vendor lock-in. As attractive as the initial cost savings and streamlined operations are, transitioning away from that single backup vendor can be challenging and even more costly over time. 

Organizations may find it difficult to switch vendors or integrate new technologies that better suit their evolving requirements. To mitigate this risk, businesses should carefully evaluate vendor contracts, negotiate flexible terms, understand how they would enable you to migrate to a different vendor if needed and maintain contingency plans for vendor transitions or service disruptions.

Advantages of Avoiding Backup Vendor Consolidation

Taking a diversified approach to backup vendors allows organizations to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket and offers significant advantages like risk mitigation, competitive pricing, and innovation.

Risk Mitigation

By spreading data protection of applications across multiple vendors, you reduce the surface area of attack and eliminate the possibility of a single point of failure. For example, if a vendor who focuses on backing up ERP applications experiences a service outage or data breach, the critical CRM data you back up with a different vendor’s solution won’t be affected. 

This approach strengthens resilience against unforeseen events and enables a robust contingency plan during emergencies. Diversified vendors can also mitigate operational risks by offering varied support models and redundancies, further safeguarding against disruptions. 

Reducing the Surface Area of Attack

Reducing attack surface is all about minimizing the exposure of systems and data to potential risks. Organizations can achieve this by implementing strategies such as network segmentation, strict access controls, and regular security patching. 

Spreading backups across multiple vendors further mitigates risk by diversifying storage locations and providers — ensuring data remains accessible even if one vendor is compromised. It enhances data loss prevention, effectively safeguards critical information, and facilitates operational continuity in the face of evolving cyber threats.

Competitive Pricing

Maintaining relationships with multiple backup vendors empowers organizations to leverage competitive pricing dynamics to their advantage. Competition encourages vendors to offer better rates and more innovative features to attract and retain customers. This helps customers negotiate more favorable pricing terms, SLAs, and additional value-added services.

Innovation

Independent application-specific backup vendors are often innovation leaders because they’re able to focus and specialize on protecting a singular application — allowing them to create more innovative and future-proof functionality. 

Oftentimes, they go beyond backup to enhance your data’s usability and strategic value. This is critical because, after all, what value does data really have if it’s not easily usable? Partnering with these app-specific backup vendors enables you to foster a culture of continuous improvement and technological advancement.

The Importance of Vendor Diversification

There are also long-term benefits of maintaining relationships with multiple backup vendors. For instance, vendors who specialize in specific application data backup, such as for Salesforce, are inherently going to prioritize protecting that application’s data and innovating enhanced capabilities. Generalized vendors that provide data backup for multiple applications can’t possibly prioritize all of them. You can’t trust that they’ll safeguard data and innovate in areas that are critical to your business. 

With diversification, you’re also more likely to get the attention you need and the pricing and capabilities you want over the long term. Why? Because vendors know they risk losing your business to another one of your providers if they don’t meet your needs.

Balancing Backup Vendor Consolidation and Diversification

Finding the Right Balance

To determine the optimal balanced backup strategy for your organization, assess your data needs, risk tolerance, and operational requirements. Make sure to consider the criticality of different types of data, regulatory requirements, and budget constraints. 

This upfront work is important. It’ll help you decide whether vendor consolidation or some level of vendor diversification is best for your organization.

Best Practices for Backup Vendor Management

Leading organizations follow these best practices for managing and maximizing the value they get from backup vendors.

1. Vendor Diversification

Spread backups across multiple specialized vendors to minimize dependency and vendor lock-in, maximize innovation, and mitigate risks associated with single points of failure and increased attack surfaces.

2. Regular Evaluation

Continuously assess each vendor’s performance, security practices, and compliance with SLAs. Establish proactive and close vendor relationships.

3. Contract Flexibility

Negotiate flexible terms to accommodate evolving business needs and technological advancements.

4. Security Measures

Implement robust security protocols, including encryption and access controls, to safeguard sensitive data across all vendor platforms.

5. Disaster Recovery Planning

Develop and regularly test comprehensive disaster recovery plans to ensure rapid data restoration and business continuity in emergencies.

How GRAX Can Help

GRAX is a comprehensive data platform that’s purpose-built for Salesforce. With GRAX, users can expect full data ownership and governance in their own cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, and other clouds or on-prem) — meaning we never hold your data hostage like other vendors who lock you in. 

GRAX also goes beyond backup and makes it easy to leverage detailed historical Salesforce backup data for reporting and analytics, feeding AI and ML algorithms, and conducting comprehensive trend analysis. Our unique focus on helping customers maximize the value of their Salesforce investments has significant business impacts. Customers get actionable insights, vastly improve decision-making, strengthen customer relationships and loyalty, drive operational efficiencies, and boost revenue.

Watch our demo video to see why Global 100 companies trust GRAX to protect their Salesforce data or join us at Dreamforce to learn more. 

Summary

Data protection is essential to the success – and even survival – of today’s businesses. That’s why strategic backup vendor diversification and application specialization is so critical. While vendor consolidation may seem like the simplest solution, the risks often outweigh the benefits for many organizations. If you’ve already consolidated or are considering doing so, make sure to assess the true pros and cons as diversification may very well be the smartest choice for your business.