For one, Mentesana says, an administrator was spending 20 hours a week organizing and labeling tapes. Then there was reliability: occasional tape failures added to the New York-based insurance carrier's IT headaches and operational costs. Simply put, recalls Mentesana, "It was a wreck and we had to fix it."

Delphi Capital could have opted for a traditional on-premise approach to data backup. Instead, the company chose an increasingly trendy strategy: storing its data in the cloud. Mentesana selected i365's EVault, a software-as-a-service online backup system he had already successfully implemented for a previous employer.

The EVault solution automatically compresses, encrypts and delivers Delphi Capital's data over the Internet to an i365 data center. Delphi Capital determines what data should be backed up and how often, but EVault takes care of transmitting and storing the data offsite and maintains all the back-end hardware.

Before switching to EVault, the company backed up 750GB of uncompressed data using two tape appliances, each connected to its own server. By eliminating the need to package, label and ship tapes to an offsite facility every week, Mentesana avoided adding an IT administrator--a full-time position with an annual salary of about $60,000. What's more, Delphi Capital's IT team no longer sifts through logs looking for backup errors. EVault automatically notifies administrators when faults occur, giving them more time to focus on infrastructure, says Mentesana.

Better yet, i365 handles all maintenance and upgrade activities, eliminating ancillary costs that could run as high as $10,000. Mentesana says there was no telling when a drive or tape jukeboxes would need replacing. EVault allows Delphi Capital to "budget for backup" at a time when coffers everywhere are tight.