Every person that looks at backup reporting has different requirements. Usually the first requirements that people want to see are what the most common errors are, what their success rate, is or how much data is being protected. However, it seems that more and more people are looking at storage costs that are associated with backup. This goes a little bit deeper than the basic activity information. It looks at things like how much data is being stored in the backup environment, when it will expire and how it gets moved around (often called the lifecycle).The better the storage and backup environment is understood, the more informed the decisions about what and how much to purchase. The ultimate goal of all of this is to have just enough storage to do what is needed—no more, no less. Luckily, a theory has already been developed to meet this challenge called “just-in-time.” Just-in-time has been used to match the supply and demand in lots of industries, from automobile manufacturing to computer part distribution. There’s no reason that this can’t be applied to backup and storage environments. Supply simply becomes how much storage is available for backup and demand is the amount of backups that are scheduled to take place. Matching these together ensures that there is enough storage to meet the demand while not having too much that is not needed. It’s a great concept that more and more users are starting to leverage to make sure that they are running a just-in-time backup environment.Please keep your eyes peeled for more informative blogs on data protection, here on the Symantec Security Response blog. There will be many more blogs to come in the future from our data protection team – see you then!