The Softcat News Team
Nearly half of UK organisations exceeded their cloud storage budgets in 2025. Egress charges, API calls, and retrieval costs quietly inflated bills well beyond what capacity planning predicted. Backup data is particularly exposed. Enterprise data volumes grow at 25-30% annually. Backup storage grows even faster, driven by longer retention periods, immutable copies for ransomware protection, and multi-cloud redundancy.
The NCSC now reports four nationally significant cyber attacks per week in the UK. Organisations respond by keeping more copies, for longer, across more locations. The storage bill compounds.
Regulation compounds it further. FCA-regulated firms retain records for five to seven years, with some categories extending to ten. For NHS mental health records, it’s up to 30 years. The UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill broadens the scope of organisations that must demonstrate resilient backup and recovery, and roughly 1,000 additional organisations now fall into scope.
The cost problem is real. So is the compliance pressure. The question is whether you can address both without treating backup storage as a fixed, growing expense.
Rubrik’s simpler model for cloud backup economics
Rubrik Cloud Vault (RCV) is a fully managed, air-gapped backup service. It stores data in a Rubrik-owned cloud tenant, isolated from your production environment, and running across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. All data is immutable from the moment it lands.
RCV separates storage into two tiers. A Backup tier provides immediate access for disaster recovery and cyber incidents. An Archive tier moves older snapshots to cold storage for long-term retention. You choose which tier applies to each workload through SLA policies. That flexibility matters. Hyperscaler-native tiering forces data through predefined schedules but with RCV , you control the destination directly.
The core proposition here is isolation. When your primary data is compromised, RCV provides a clean, air-gapped copy ready for recovery. Rubrik backs this with a ransomware recovery warranty of up to $10 million, which covers data recovery costs when Rubrik cannot restore protected data following a qualifying attack.
RCV pricing is predictable too: a per-TB subscription covering storage, API calls, and egress. Egress costs during cyber recovery events are fully covered, with no penalty for restoring data when it matters most. This removes the cost uncertainty that makes traditional cloud backup budgets so difficult to forecast.
Why traditional backup cost models break down
Most organisations still run a one-tier-fits-all approach to cloud backup storage. Every snapshot sits in the same tier, whether it was taken yesterday or three years ago. Many organisations also overpay because inactive data remains on performance tiers longer than required. Meanwhile, 55% of enterprise data is classified as dark: meaning it’s stored, protected, and backed up, but never used.
The UK threat landscape exacerbates this further, so the natural response is to store more copies, more frequently, for longer. Without intelligent lifecycle management, every step increases cost.
The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found that only around half of small UK businesses have a formal business continuity plan covering cyber, yet 71% already back up data to the cloud. That gap between adoption and strategy is where cost overruns take hold.
How Softcat helps
Backup costs should not scale faster than your data
Cloud backup storage does not have to be a growing, uncontrolled expense. Air-gapped isolation, policy-driven lifecycle management, and predictable pricing give you the tools to control costs without weakening your recovery posture.
Whether you are reviewing backup costs or rethinking retention strategy ahead of new regulatory obligations, Softcat can help. We will assess your environment and build a plan that balances cost, compliance, and confidence in recovery. Get in touch with our Sales team here, to find out more.