Cloud-to-cloud backup is one of those services where the headline price can look reassuringly simple — a monthly fee per user, per seat, or per gigabyte — and the actual cost of getting it right turns out to be considerably more nuanced.
If you’re evaluating cloud-to-cloud backup for the first time, reviewing your current provider’s pricing, or trying to understand why quotes from different providers vary so significantly, this article is for you. It breaks down the real components of cloud-to-cloud backup costs, the factors that drive pricing up or down, and the hidden costs that don’t appear on the initial quote but matter considerably when something goes wrong.
What Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Actually Is
Before getting into pricing, it’s worth being clear on what you’re paying for.
Cloud-to-cloud backup is the process of copying data from one cloud platform — such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace — to a separate, independent cloud backup environment. It exists because SaaS platforms don’t provide comprehensive backup of your data as part of the service. They protect their infrastructure. They don’t protect your data from accidental deletion, ransomware, user error, or application corruption.
If you haven’t already read our article on cloud-to-cloud backup explained, it’s a good starting point for understanding exactly what the service covers and why it’s necessary even if you’re running on a major cloud platform.
The Core Pricing Models
Cloud-to-cloud backup providers typically use one of a few pricing structures, and understanding the differences matters for comparing quotes accurately.
Per-user pricing is the most common model for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup. You pay a monthly fee for each licensed user, and backup covers the data associated with that user — mailbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, SharePoint or shared drives depending on the scope included.
The appeal of per-user pricing is simplicity. The risk is that it can mask variation in how much data is actually covered per user. A licence that includes email backup but not SharePoint, or that caps the amount of data stored per user, may look comparable to a more comprehensive licence on a per-head basis but deliver substantially less protection.
Per-gigabyte pricing charges based on the volume of data backed up. This can look attractive for smaller organisations with modest data volumes, but it introduces variability — as your data grows, so does your bill, and predicting the trajectory isn’t always straightforward.
Flat-rate licensing covers a defined number of users or a defined data volume for a fixed monthly fee. This is easier to budget for but requires you to manage your licence ceiling — if you grow beyond it, you’ll be looking at a tier upgrade or overage charges.
Most enterprise-grade cloud-to-cloud backup providers use per-user pricing with optional add-ons for extended retention or additional data sources. Understanding exactly what the base licence includes — and what the add-ons cost — is the first step in making an accurate comparison.
What Drives the Price Up
Several factors push cloud-to-cloud backup costs above the base per-user fee. Being aware of them upfront helps you build a realistic budget and avoid surprises.
Retention period
How long your backups are retained has a direct impact on storage costs, and therefore on price. A 30-day retention window is relatively inexpensive. Twelve months of retention costs more. Indefinite or multi-year retention — which some compliance frameworks require — costs considerably more again.
Before settling on a retention period, it’s worth thinking through your actual requirements. For UK businesses subject to GDPR, there’s a tension between keeping data long enough to meet legitimate recovery and compliance needs and not retaining personal data longer than necessary. Your retention policy should be documented and defensible, not simply set to whatever the default is.
Data sources covered
The number of data sources covered within a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace environment varies significantly between providers and licence tiers. At the basic end, backup may cover only Exchange Online mailboxes. A more comprehensive licence might also cover:
- OneDrive for Business
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Teams (chats, channels, and files)
- Calendar and contacts
Each additional data source adds to the storage volume and therefore to the cost. For most businesses, mailbox-only backup is insufficient — the data that matters is spread across multiple services, and a backup that only covers one of them leaves significant gaps.
Our article on Microsoft 365 backup covers what a complete backup scope looks like for a Microsoft 365 environment and why each data source matters.
Frequency of backups
How often your backup runs affects both your data protection level and your costs. Some providers run backups once daily. Others offer multiple backups per day. A few offer near-continuous backup.
Your backup frequency directly determines your Recovery Point Objective — the maximum amount of data you could lose in the event of an incident. If your backup runs once a day at midnight, an incident at 4pm means you could lose up to 16 hours of work. Whether that’s acceptable depends entirely on your business and the systems involved.
More frequent backups cost more. Understanding what frequency your business actually needs — rather than defaulting to whatever the provider’s standard is — helps you pay for the level of protection you genuinely require without over-specifying unnecessarily.
Storage volume
Regardless of which pricing model a provider uses, storage volume is ultimately what drives infrastructure costs on their end — and those costs are reflected in your price. Businesses with large mailboxes, extensive SharePoint environments, or significant Teams data will pay more than those with lighter footprints.
Some providers offer compression and deduplication to reduce effective storage volume. Others pass raw storage costs through more directly. It’s worth asking specifically how a provider handles storage efficiency, particularly if your data volumes are significant.
Restore capabilities and SLAs
The cost of taking backup data is only part of the picture. The cost of the restoration capability — and the SLA around how quickly data can be restored — also varies between providers and licence tiers.
A cheap backup service that takes 48 hours to restore your email data following an incident may be significantly less valuable than a more expensive one that can restore granularly within minutes. When evaluating pricing, factor in not just the backup cost but the recovery capability you’re actually paying for. Our article on cloud-to-cloud backup mistakes covers some of the errors businesses make when they focus too heavily on backup cost and too little on recovery capability.
The Hidden Costs Worth Knowing About
Beyond the headline subscription fee, a few cost categories are worth considering explicitly when building your budget.
Egress fees
Some cloud backup providers charge for data egress — the cost of moving data out of their storage environment during a restore. These fees don’t appear on the monthly subscription invoice, but they can be substantial if you need to restore large volumes of data.
Ask prospective providers specifically about egress fees before signing. A provider whose per-user fee looks competitive but charges significant egress costs on restoration may not be the bargain it appears.
Support and administration costs
Managing a cloud-to-cloud backup environment requires ongoing administration — monitoring backup jobs, investigating failures, managing retention policies, handling restore requests, and reviewing coverage as your user base changes. If this is handled internally, that’s an internal resource cost. If it’s handled by your managed IT provider, it should be included within your managed service scope rather than billed separately.
If your current microsoft 365 support services london arrangement doesn’t include backup management as a standard component, it’s worth clarifying whether backup monitoring and administration falls within scope or represents additional work.
Testing restores
Backup that has never been tested is backup of unknown reliability. Regularly testing restores — verifying that backed-up data can actually be recovered cleanly — is an operational necessity, not an optional extra. If your managed provider doesn’t include regular restore testing as part of the service, factor in the cost of this separately.
Incident response and forensic restoration
In the event of a ransomware attack or significant data loss event, restoration is rarely a simple process of clicking “restore all.” It often involves identifying exactly which data was affected, determining the right restore point, and recovering data selectively to avoid reintroducing compromised files. This kind of forensic restoration takes time and expertise — and in an incident scenario, time is money.
The connection between backup and your broader incident response posture is worth thinking through carefully. If dark web monitoring services london services are part of your security framework, for example, early warning of a credential compromise can give you the window to act before ransomware deploys — reducing the likelihood that you’ll need to invoke a full restoration in the first place.
Comparing Providers: What to Look at Beyond Price
When you’re comparing cloud-to-cloud backup providers, a few questions will quickly reveal whether a lower price reflects genuine efficiency or simply less coverage.
- What data sources are included in the base licence, and which cost extra?
- What is the default retention period, and what does extended retention cost?
- How frequently does backup run, and what is the minimum RPO in the base licence?
- Are there egress fees on restoration, and if so, at what rate?
- What restoration granularity is available — can you restore individual emails, files, or SharePoint items, or only full account restores?
- What is the SLA for restoration, and is it contractually guaranteed?
- Is backup monitoring and job failure alerting included, or is that a separate service?
Answers to these questions will often reveal that two providers with similar headline prices are offering quite different levels of protection — and that the cheapest option is not always the most cost-effective when the full picture is considered.
For businesses currently going through a platform migration services project — moving from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, for example, or migrating between tenants — backup coverage during the migration window is a specific consideration that’s easy to overlook. Make sure your backup provider and your migration provider have explicitly agreed on how coverage is maintained throughout the transition.
How Scale and Geography Affect Cost
For businesses operating across multiple countries, cloud-to-cloud backup introduces additional cost and complexity considerations.
Data residency requirements may mean that backup data needs to be stored within specific geographic boundaries — within the UK or the EU, for example. Not all providers offer regional storage options, and those that do may charge a premium for data residency compliance. If your business has European offices with staff whose data falls under GDPR, your backup storage location matters both from a compliance and a cost perspective.
Working with european support services that understand these regional requirements means you’re not making storage decisions on the assumption that a single global data region satisfies your obligations.
Licence alignment across geographies also affects cost. If your Microsoft 365 licences vary by region — different tiers in different countries, for example — your backup licensing needs to be reviewed to ensure it covers all the data sources present across your full tenant, not just the configuration at your primary office.
For businesses with a wider international footprint, working with it services global coverage means backup requirements in each country can be reviewed in context rather than applied uniformly from a UK-centric perspective.
Our article on safety first: backing up your vital business data covers the foundational principles that apply regardless of geography and is worth revisiting when you’re building out a backup strategy for a more complex, multi-region environment.
Google Workspace: A Quick Note on Pricing Differences
Most of the pricing factors above apply equally to Google Workspace backup as to Microsoft 365 backup. The specific data sources differ — Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Shared Drives — but the same questions around retention, frequency, egress, and restore capability apply.
One area where Google Workspace backup often differs is in the depth of coverage available for Shared Drives, which are used extensively in many organisations as a primary collaboration tool. Make sure any Google Workspace backup licence you’re evaluating explicitly includes Shared Drive coverage at the scope your organisation uses them.
Our article on Google Workspace backup covers the specific considerations for Google environments in more detail.
What You Should Be Spending
There’s no universal right answer to what cloud-to-cloud backup should cost, because the right answer depends on your data volume, retention requirements, recovery objectives, and the coverage you actually need. What we can say with confidence is that the cost of not having adequate backup — measured against the cost of recovering from a significant data loss event — makes even premium backup pricing look modest.
For context, a mid-market Microsoft 365 backup solution covering email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams with 12 months of retention and daily backup typically costs between £3 and £6 per user per month in the UK market. Extended retention, higher backup frequency, or additional data sources will push that figure upwards. Comprehensive restore testing and managed administration on top of that is a further consideration.
If your current backup solution is costing significantly less than this range, it’s worth understanding exactly what’s included — and whether the gap reflects genuine efficiency or gaps in coverage that may only become apparent when you need to restore something.
For businesses looking at global it support london based providers to manage cloud backup as part of a broader managed IT service, the right question to ask is whether backup monitoring, restore testing, and incident response are included as standard or billed separately — and whether the managed service includes regular review of your backup configuration as your Microsoft 365 environment evolves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Microsoft 365 include backup as part of the subscription?
No. Microsoft 365 includes short-term recoverability features — such as the Recycle Bin and limited version history — but these are not a substitute for backup. They don’t protect against all data loss scenarios, they have limited retention windows, and they don’t provide the granular restoration capability that a dedicated backup solution offers. A separate cloud-to-cloud backup solution is required if you want genuine data protection.
How much data does a typical Microsoft 365 user generate?
This varies considerably by role and organisation. A typical business user might have a mailbox of between 5GB and 30GB, plus additional data in OneDrive and any SharePoint sites they’re associated with. Organisations with significant SharePoint or Teams usage can have per-user effective data volumes significantly above this. Understanding your actual data footprint before selecting a backup solution helps you choose a licence that won’t generate unexpected overage costs.
What’s the difference between backup and archiving?
Backup is designed for recovery — restoring data to its previous state after a loss event. Archiving is designed for retention and search — keeping data accessible for compliance, legal, or audit purposes over a long period. They serve different purposes and are often priced differently. Some organisations need both; others need one more than the other. Making sure you’re buying the right product for your actual requirement saves both money and frustration.
Should cloud-to-cloud backup be part of my managed IT contract?
Ideally, yes. When backup is managed as part of a broader IT service rather than as a standalone product, monitoring, administration, restore testing, and incident response are all coordinated through a single provider. This reduces the risk of gaps falling between responsibilities and makes the overall service more coherent.
How do I know if my current backup is actually working?
The only reliable way to know is to test a restore. If you can’t remember the last time a restore was tested — or if you’ve never tested one — that’s the first thing to address. A backup that hasn’t been tested is a backup of unknown reliability, and you don’t want to discover the problem in the middle of an incident.
What happens to my backup data if I change providers?
This varies significantly between providers and is worth understanding before you sign a contract. Some providers allow data export in standard formats. Others make it difficult or expensive to retrieve your backup data if you leave. Reviewing exit provisions — including what happens to your backup data and how it can be exported — is a sensible part of any procurement process.
Ready to Review Your Cloud Backup Coverage and Cost?
If you’re not confident that your current cloud-to-cloud backup covers everything it should — or if you want to understand whether you’re paying a fair price for the protection you’re getting — we’re happy to help you work through it.
Northern Star works with businesses across the UK and internationally to make sure Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments are properly backed up, actively monitored, and genuinely recoverable when it matters.
Get in touch with our team today for a straightforward conversation about your current backup setup and whether it’s giving you the protection your business needs.
