How much does business backup cost in Australia?

Managed backup is usually priced per user or by volume of data, as a monthly subscription. For a small Australian business it is one of the smaller lines in an IT budget, and the number is driven by how much data you hold, how long you keep it, how fast you need to recover, and whether anyone is accountable for testing that recovery works.

The unhelpful thing about researching this is that backup is sold in at least three different shapes, and their prices are not comparable. Storage-only services charge for space and leave the work to you. Backup software charges per device or per user and still leaves the work to you. Managed backup includes the software, the storage, the monitoring, the testing and the restore, and costs more because it contains labour. Comparing a storage price to a managed price and concluding one provider is expensive is the most common error in this purchase.

The genuine cost drivers are worth knowing, because they let you read any quote properly. Data volume is the obvious one, though less decisive than people expect for small businesses. Retention is bigger: keeping thirty days is very different from seven years, and industries with record-keeping obligations sit at the long end. Recovery speed matters, since faster restore paths cost more to maintain. Coverage is where quotes quietly diverge, because a price covering the file server and not Microsoft 365, or not the line-of-business database, is a smaller product wearing the same name. And testing, the item most often absent, is the one that turns a backup into a recovery.

For most small businesses the sensible way to buy it is as part of managed IT rather than as a standalone line, because the value is in someone watching it. Our plans work that way: $79 to $199 per user per month depending on the Essential Eight tier, with protected, tested backups among the controls, so backup is not a separate subscription somebody has to remember to check. That structure also removes the failure mode where a backup service runs unmonitored for eight months, fails silently in month two, and is discovered in month nine.

Then there are the costs that quotes tend to leave out, and they are not small. Egress and restore fees on some cloud storage, which are invisible until the day you need the data and then arrive at the worst moment. The internet capacity to actually move a full restore, which is a real constraint on a business ADSL-era connection. The labour of a restore, if the plan assumes your provider does it and the contract says otherwise. And the biggest one, which does not appear on any invoice: the time your business is down while the recovery happens, which is a function of how the system was designed rather than what it cost.

Set against that, the comparison worth making is not backup versus nothing but backup versus the incident. The Australian Signals Directorate puts the average cost of a cybercrime incident for an Australian business at $58,666, and ransomware without a clean restore is precisely the scenario that produces numbers like that. Add the ordinary, uninsured version, three days of a ten-person team unable to work, and the monthly figure stops looking like a cost and starts looking like the cheapest risk transfer available.

If you are comparing quotes, force them onto one page: what exactly is covered, including cloud platforms and line-of-business systems; how long data is retained; who performs a restore and how fast; whether restores are tested and how often you will see evidence; and what a full recovery would cost in fees. A provider who answers all five in writing is quoting the same product you are trying to buy. One who resists the fifth question has told you something useful.

The honest caveat: cheap backup that is never tested is not a saving, it is an unfunded liability with a monthly fee, and there is plenty of it about. The line worth spending on is not more storage but proven recovery. If you want to know what your current arrangement actually covers before you price anything, the Cyber Security Scorecard checks it free, or call 1800 456 567.