Quick summary
- Manual and fragmented backups create compliance gaps, slow restores, and a higher risk of data loss.
- Inefficient recovery wastes time and budget, especially when you restore more than you need.
- Lack of automation leaves backups brittle and unable to scale with multi-cloud workloads.
- The fix: posture-aware (live coverage, retention, and security tracking), cloud-native backups that are selective, searchable, and cost-transparent.
If your backups haven’t kept up with your cloud infrastructure, they’re quietly draining budget, time, and trust. Here’s where the money goes:
1) Manual and Fragmented Backups Put Your Budget and Compliance at Risk
When backups live in multiple tools and rely on human upkeep, you get:
- Conflicting retention policies and encryption gaps.
- Data silos that leave critical workloads exposed.
- Audit failures from incomplete or missing records.
It’s no surprise that 54% of organizations in the State of Cloud Backup 2025 cite compliance or security risk from mismanaged data. For regulated industries, that can mean missed certifications, fines, or even lost contracts.
One enterprise customer told us that reconciling a 5,000-line Azure bill to a single backup server used to be almost impossible. Manual tagging and tracking across multiple tools made it hard to prove spend or spot optimization opportunities until well after the billing cycle closed.
2) Slow, Inefficient Recovery That Drains Time, Money, and Customer Trust
Before partnering with Eon, StructuredWeb’s IT team spent hours chasing down backups and navigating complex restore processes. Manual classification and fragmented tools made recovery slow and frustrating, often delaying critical restores.
With this kind of setup, selective restores aren’t possible, so teams have to bring back everything during an incident, inflating compute and storage costs while stretching downtime.
They weren’t alone. The State of Cloud Backup 2025 found that 38% of organizations aren’t confident they can recover quickly and completely, a gap that’s costly in both revenue and reputation.
3) Manual Processes That Break Under Data Growth
Only a small fraction of teams in the State of Cloud Backup 2025 have fully automated their backup posture. As cloud environments expand, manual and semi-automated processes break down, leaving gaps that no one notices until it’s too late.
We’ve seen teams miss backups for entire regions simply because no one updated a script after adding resources.
One fast-growing SaaS company found backup scripts failing silently whenever new workloads spun up. Weeks could pass before anyone caught it, leaving high-value datasets unprotected and forcing the team to re-run massive jobs, which eat into both budget and bandwidth.
How IT Leaders Are Eliminating Backup Waste and Reducing Costs
The first step is spotting the waste with tools like Eon’s Cost Explorer. That visibility doesn’t just cut cloud bills—it gives IT teams back hours they used to spend chasing down backup data across accounts and tools.
It quickly surfaces unused snapshots, duplicate datasets, and bloated retention before they drain your budget. One customer told us that, before Eon, reconciling cloud spend across accounts was almost impossible. Now they can roll it up in minutes, pinpoint costly patterns, and act before the bill arrives.
From there, high-performing teams make five moves for fast ROI (full guide to improving cloud backup strategy):
- Automate and integrate: Replace manual processes with posture-aware, cloud-native backups that auto-classify and apply retention rules instantly.
- Get complete coverage: Discover and tag resources in real time to eliminate blind spots.
- Recover only what you need: StructuredWeb cut recovery times by 98% (to just 10–15 minutes for common scenarios) after moving to granular restores and posture-aware backups.
- Centralize in a queryable data lake: Enable analytics, compliance checks, and AI-ready data without extra ETL steps.
- Standardize across clouds: Apply consistent retention and ransomware protection everywhere, avoiding the policy gaps that drive cost and risk.
The result? Innago achieved 40% cost savings by replacing traditional snapshots and duplicate backups with Eon’s backup-optimized storage tier while meeting SOC 2, PCI, and GDPR compliance and maintaining 10–15 minute restore times for Kubernetes and EC2 workloads.
What You Gain with a Posture-Aware, Cost-Transparent Backup Strategy
When your backups are posture-aware, automated, and cost-transparent, you:
- Cut cloud costs by restoring only what’s needed.
- Breeze through audits with organized, classified data.
- Feed AI and analytics with structured historical data.
How much time does your team spend manually tagging resources for backups?
See how Eon automates this entire process in a 10-minute demo.
