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Azure Backup vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Backup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Azure Backup is 3.6%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Terry Tull - PeerSpot reviewer
Straightforward to set up and manage and allows us to monitor all backups in one place
I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as an eight out of ten. Setting up Azure Backup was pretty straightforward, especially if you follow the steps in the right order. It might seem a bit complex at first, but with experience, subsequent setups become easier. Planning is key to optimizing its effectiveness. Deploying Azure Backup typically takes around half an hour to an hour to set up one VM, involving creating a recovery services vault, defining a backup policy, and configuring storage options. For a more comprehensive setup including proper recovery planning, it might take a few hours. The key steps involve creating a resource group, and a recovery services vault, selecting a storage type, and defining backup policies. I deployed the solution myself.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution helped us use R2 RBO to back up frequently."
"It is a stable solution...The product is worth the money you pay for it."
"It's very simple to configure which is very useful. It's not complex to configure it."
"This solution is easy to configure and restore. It is a Microsoft product so is easily compatible with other solutions."
"It is easy to schedule backups."
"I like that it's a stable solution and their support is good. I think Microsoft's commercial force is superior."
"The best aspect of the solution is its backup functionality."
"The compression features save us money and speed up the backup and restore process."
"What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines."
"It saves you a lot of storage."
"One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market."
"It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to."
"All other products contain the same features, but when I'm backing up an IBM Power server I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor."
"The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production."
"For initial setup, we started with the blueprints, which were great. The blueprints allowed us to be able to decide if we needed to use small, medium,k or large. Because we are a large environment, we used a large blueprint. Once we followed everything in the blueprint, it was a smooth transition from there."
"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."
 

Cons

"The support for Office365 backup is atrocious and is something that has to be improved."
"Connection with more legacy data services could be beneficial as some are currently unsupported."
"I would like to see better pricing."
"I once tried restoring a Linux environment, and the size of the Linux VM or the data disk was really huge. It took a really long time to restore the environment and send the data from the storage to the disk. It took around 25 to 30 minutes, which was much longer than I anticipated. They can improve the duration of such restore operations. In the next release, it would also be good if they could reduce the duration for transferring the data from their storage to the actual storage while creating a virtual machine. They can reduce the duration or increase the data transfer rate."
"The time required to restore files should be a little faster."
"The reporting functionality of Azure Backup needs improvement."
"The only thing I would say that could be improved is the reporting."
"To make it a ten, it should have the ability to extend the retention and to perform a copy of the data outside of the subscription - with no additional costs."
"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."
"IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool."
"They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security."
"I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances."
"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."
"IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container."
"The Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies."
"The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Backup can be expensive if you are not vigilant about your storage steering."
"We have enterprise-level pricing. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"It is incredibly cost-effective and offers fixed pricing, with no additional fees for the licensing."
"The price is somewhat high and could be lower."
"We do not have any additional costs for Azure Backup."
"Support payment works by the level of partnership and the number of shares."
"The product is neither too expensive nor too cheap."
"The pricing of the solution does not depend on the service itself but rather on the minimum data volume encountered. This pricing approach seems reasonable and is on par with other competitors in the market. It is a good solution for on-premise needs because it is more cost-effective. When evaluating the overall financial expenditure, including operational costs and the impact on the IT team, Azure Backup is a favorable choice."
"IBM Spectrum Protect, cost-wise, has way higher pricing than Veeam. By switching over to Veeam, my company saved over $600,000 in USD. The IBM Spectrum Protect pricing is a two on a scale of one to ten. My company paid additional fees for maintenance, apart from the standard licensing fees."
"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."
"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."
"For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable...I don't think most people know that when a company has large systems in place, the TCO is a lot lower."
"I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged."
"There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more."
"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."
"The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, IBM and Symantec have less costly options."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Backup differ from Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Vee...
What do you like most about Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is easy to configure and restore.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is expensive relative to the value we get from it. I do not have specific details about the licensing cost as it falls under another department.
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dash...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,791 professionals have used our research since 2012.