Most production IT projects are planned months, if not years, in advance of deployment. However, advanced planning of infrastructure upgrades for the data protection architecture seldom occurs. The problem is that updates to the backup infrastructure can often be expensive and because they are not budgeted, the organization is forced to scramble to allocate funds toward the project. Reallocation of funds means that other projects are delayed or not rolled out to their original scale. The lack of planning also forces the organization to pay extra by not spending the appropriate time finding more cost-effective solutions.