2022 Clumio Innovation Look Back

A new year brings the opportunity to reflect back on all the amazing things we’ve accomplished through the past year, and 2022 marked another year of industry-changing innovation at Clumio. We ended 2021 with a blockbuster Early Access Program for Clumio Protect for Amazon S3, and launched the product in General Availability in early 2022. Throughout 2022 we delivered a ton of innovation driven by customers’ continued demand for next-generation scale, lower RPOs and RTOs, platform simplicity, and enterprise features to ensure all their data is protected. With Clumio’s simplified data protection, customers have been able to offload protection to Clumio versus struggling to build it themselves, while getting all the unique data classification, rapid granular recovery, and cost optimization Clumio provides.

Mark Huber, Senior Director of Engineering Enablement at Cox Automotive, said it best:

“We have been innovating at a rapid pace in the public cloud and optimally protecting our mission-critical data in Amazon S3 is a challenge. Our Amazon S3 data is immense and diverse. We originally planned to build our own backup solution, but the effort was massive. Clumio listened to our feedback and tirelessly worked with our teams to deliver Clumio Protect for Amazon S3. We can selectively provide the right levels of protection for our Amazon S3 data via global policies and protection groups. Global search enables quick recovery of any bucket or object for compliance needs, and optimizations to reduce small object overhead and deliver a low TCO.”

During 2022 we saw a massive acceleration of cloud optimization toward a more modern cloud stack, where Amazon S3 became the persistent storage solution. Data lake protection became the new challenge to solve, where the velocity and scale broke all previously understood protection models, requiring continuous protection, near real-time RTOs, and almost infinite scale.

To help our customers overcome these new challenges, we delivered the following innovations in 2022:

January 2022

• Knowledge Base: Customers no longer need to log into the support site to get access to Clumio Knowledge Base articles, as they can be found directly through the Resource Center within Clumio. This includes both public and private articles.
• Organization Unit Support for Protection Rules: Customers can now create protection rules at the organizational unit (OU) level. These rules are applicable to the OU and any child OUs contained within it.

February 2022

• API Service Tokens: Administrators can create Service Tokens and assign them to Organizational Units and Roles, just like users, which give them a scalable way to programmatically access, integrate, and automate Clumio. Unlike Personal Tokens, Service Tokens are not dependent on the permissions or access of any individual user.
• Contacts and Calendars Added to Clumio Protect for Microsoft 365: Customers can backup and restore Microsoft 365 contacts and calendars, in addition to the existing support for M365 email.
• Child Organizational Unit Protection Rules in Global Organizational Unit: While in the Global OU, administrators can now see all rules associated with Child OUs. Additionally, OUs can be filtered allowing customers to simplify the view across a large number of Child OUs.

March 2022

• Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 Supports Tags in Protection Groups:  Add buckets to Protection Groups automatically using Bucket Tags, instead of having to add them manually.

April 2022

• AWS Account Alias Support for Protection Rules: When customers create or edit a Protection Rule they can now see each account’s AWS Account Alias, and also search by Alias instead of the account number.
• Consumption Reporting Forecasting Support: Clumio now provides an estimate that shows customers an estimate of how many days remain before their credits are all used. This estimate has been helping customers eliminate surprises and plan ahead.
• Out-of-Region Support Added to Clumio Protect for Amazon S3: Customers can now restore S3 assets outside of the source region.

May 2022

• Clumio Protect for Amazon DynamoDB: We introduced air-gapped protection for AWS DynamoDB using Clumio SecureVault with the following key features:
  • Cross-account, cross-region protection for DynamoDB tables
  • Incremental backups
  • Granular Record Retrieval, including Transparent Data Access
  • Support for out-of-region restore
• DynamoDB Global Table Support: Clumio now supports backup and restore for DynamoDB Global tables.
• S3 Discover: The new S3 Inventory Details page provides global bucket-level insight into S3 assets and lets customers investigate their high-value assets. Customers can now see:
  • How their total S3 storage is divided among different storage classes
  • How their top S3 buckets have changed over time, by total storage size, total object count, and average object size
  • Details on each bucket, including total size, object count and storage classes
• Enhanced EC2 Restore Experience: Customers no longer need to provide an AMI ID when they restore EC2.

June 2022

• Organization Unit Flexibility: Customers can now change an environment’s Organizational Unit directly from the AWS Environments page. This change can be performed by clicking the Actions icon for the environment they want to move.
• Security Improvements – Separating EC2/EBS from RDS: When customers add a new environment using CloudFormation, enabling EC2, EBS, and RDS is now optional. Customers now have the ability to enable EC2 and EBS separately from RDS.

July 2022

• Restore to In-Place Archives (Early Access):  Customers can now restore a Microsoft 365 mail In-Place Archive (IPA) back to the user’s IPA. Previously, IPAs were restored to the user’s main mailbox. Note: Please contact Clumio Support to enable this feature.
• International Region Expansion: Customers can now protect AWS data sources in Frankfurt and Ireland regions through a dedicated Clumio instance in Europe. This allows customers to have all backups, restores, and data processing of AWS assets within the EU region itself.

August 2022

• Simplified User Management with Automatic User Provisioning (Early Access): Customers can now assign their users to roles and OUs automatically, based on membership to groups in their IDP. This feature requires single sign-on to be enabled in Clumio. Note: Please contact Clumio Support for early access to automatic user provisioning.
• SecureVault Lite for Amazon EC2/EBS (General Availability): SecureVault Lite offers a lower cost alternative to SecureVault Standard. With SecureVault Lite, customers who don’t need to restore frequently can pay a reduced per-GB price to backup, with  a small charge for each data restore. (SecureVault Standard offers restores free of cost.)
• Backup Performance Increases for Microsoft 365: Customers can now connect to and protect more than one Microsoft 365 account, with more than one connection to each account. Note: Please contact Clumio Support to expand your Microsoft 365 protection.
• New Consumption Report: The Consumption Report is completely redesigned, with all new features including customers’ consumption data by credits, dollars, or usage metrics. Customers can apply filters to see consumption by asset type or for a single asset, and can download consumption data as a CSV file.
• RDS Daily Air-Gap Backups: RDS Databases can now be protected in Clumio’s SecureVault on a daily basis. This feature allows our customers to protect all RDS Databases against ransomware and accidental deletion.
• Dark Mode: Customers can now change how Clumio appears in their browser with the new Dark Mode theme, available from Profile Settings.

September 2022

• New Discover Inventory Details for EBS and EC2: Discover’s new inventory details for EBS and EC2 offer insight into asset utilization and the rate at which customer data is changing and growing. By monitoring these changes, customers can understand their backup storage needs and identify any unexpected changes in usage.
• Enhancements to Terraform Provider: We made it simpler for customers to automate their account management, data protection, user access, and especially security through support for external AWS Encryption Keys and Permissions Boundaries. All new product releases that have Terraform applicability are incorporated into our provider within one week of feature release. Watch our Data Resiliency as Code demo to see the Clumio Terraform Provider in action.

October 2022

• S3 Continuous Backups (General Availability): Clumio now offers the ability to backup data at frequent intervals throughout the day, with RPO as low as 15 minutes. Customers can now restore their data from any point during that day.
• BYOK Support for All Data Sources: Users who want to use their own KMS key to encrypt their data now have access to Multi-Region Key support for RDS, DynamoDB, S3 and all previously KMS key encryption-supported data sources. If customers encrypt their data using their own KMS key, they can upgrade to Multi-Region Key support for RDS, DynamoDB, and S3.
• Clumio Convert: This feature allows our customers to migrate their AWS EC2 snapshots into Clumio. Customers can migrate and store their EC2 snapshots from AWS into Clumio. Note: Please contact Clumio Support with a list of snapshots that you may want to migrate from AWS EC2 into Clumio.
• SecureVault Lite for Clumio Convert: Customers can now choose whether to migrate their AWS EC2 snapshots into Clumio SecureVault or Clumio SecureVault Lite. Note: Please contact Clumio Support with a list of the snapshots you want to migrate.
• Clumio In-App Feedback: At Clumio, we take customer feedback very seriously. We realize the importance of addressing real world customer needs in our roadmap. While we always welcome live discussions, we added a way for busy customers to  submit feature requests, ideas, and general improvements directly through our Resource Center (Lightbulb icon in the bottom left). Using the feedback feature, customers can track the status of requests they are interested in, vote on features submitted by others, see what we are currently working on, and review what we have released.

November 2022

• Policy Details Page: When clicking on a policy, customers will now see additional useful information about the policy, including:
  • Protected Assets: At a glance, customers can view the type and count of the assets protected by the policy. Additionally, the new assets tab gives them granular visibility into what the policy protects.
  • Frequency and Retention: A new table view allows customers to quickly see and compare backup frequency and retention across asset types.
  • Policy Edit History: Customers can see when a policy was last edited or changed.
• Top-level Organizational Unit (OU) Policies Are Now Automatically Available to Child OUs: Previously, a child OU could not see policies of its parent OU unless the parent OU policy was explicitly assigned to the child OU. Now, customers no longer need to assign the policy to a child OU to have the child OU be able to see and use it. Parent OUs can now initiate the on-demand backup of any asset of a child OU.
• New Discover Details for EBS and EC2: Discover now gives the overview of the provisioned size, utilized size, change rate, and growth rate for backups of EBS and EC2 assets. Customers can use these metrics to monitor any change trends over time.

December 2022

• Check Credit Pools and Balances from the Consumption Report: Customers can now check their active credit pools and remaining balances in the Consumption Report, at Reports > Consumption Report.
• New S3 Bucket-level Details: Customers can now view bucket-level insights on versioning, replication, and encryption status in Discover’s S3 Inventory Details page. They can also view the configuration status in Protect’s Asset Details page.

I want to extend a huge thank you to all our customers throughout 2022 for supporting us and helping us define Clumio’s innovations. Stay tuned for more and more innovation. We are only just getting started!

Until next time, stay SaaSy my friend! NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN!