Online Backup Software Business Requirements

This is a pre-built requirements and RFP checklist for evaluating Online Backup Software — functional backup and recovery capabilities plus roughly 100 non-functional requirements covering performance, security, scalability, integration, and compliance. Delivered as a scored Excel evaluation matrix.

A generic list confirms the tool "backs up data on a schedule" and "supports restore" — every vendor claims that. It won't ask whether backups are immutable and logically air-gapped from production credentials, which is the difference between recovering from a ransomware attack and watching the attacker encrypt your backups along with everything else. It won't flag that cloud backup pricing is often a bait-and-switch — storage is cheap, but egress fees on a full restore of a large environment can be a serious surprise bill precisely when you're already dealing with an outage. And it won't ask for granular, application-aware recovery — one mailbox item or one database table instead of an entire VM — or how the vendor proves backups are actually restorable through automated recovery testing, rather than just logging "backup completed successfully."

Contents

• Functional Requirements covering backup scope, scheduling, recovery options, retention and versioning, and monitoring
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements spanning performance, security, scalability, integration, and compliance
• Excel Evaluation Template with weighted vendor scoring

How It Gets Used

• As the requirements foundation for a backup and disaster-recovery vendor RFP
• To compare immutability, air-gapping, and ransomware-recovery claims against what vendors can actually demonstrate
• To model restore costs and recovery time objectives before signing a contract, not after an outage

Who This Is For

IT infrastructure leaders, business continuity and DR planners, and procurement teams evaluating cloud or online backup vendors.