Introducing Backup as a Service for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Moving applications to the cloud can be an exciting journey. Last week an enterprise cloud architect said, “our ability to increase agility, remove infrastructure complexity, and reduce costs in the public cloud makes us more competitive in the market today.” I could see the excitement in his face, but in the same breath, he mentioned concerns about data protection and security in the cloud. He knew his backup strategy would need to evolve or the same complexity would follow along the way.

At Clumio, we built an authentic SaaS solution to help our customers protect their data along their cloud journey with VMware on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS, and we are very excited to extend this customer experience into AWS with the protection of Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Clumio backup as a service for EBS provides data loss and ransomware protection, delivers SaaS simplicity with predictable costs, and enables global search with quick fine-grain restores. Let’s dig in on how Clumio changes the customer experience.

Data Loss and Ransomware Protection

Our customers tell us that snapshots are the default protection mechanism for EBS volumes. EBS snapshots are awesome for restoring an entire volume, but customers see the vulnerabilities of data loss and ransomware with snapshots residing in the same account as the production data. To get around this, some enterprises replicate their snapshots across accounts, which doubles the price, adds replication costs, and increases complexity.

With Clumio, data is protected outside the customer’s AWS account, providing an air gap solution that removes data loss vulnerabilities from ransomware or bad actors who gain access to your AWS account. Clumio is always focused on data security, so all data is encrypted in-flight and at rest to ensure all data is protected in transport. We leverage a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) in your account to index, dedupe and compress the data before it is sent to S3 in our Clumio authentic SaaS solution.

SaaS Simplicity at Predictable Costs

Moving a super complex on-premises backup product to the cloud or trying to create your own snapshot and replication automation is not a strategic effort for most enterprises.

The excellent news is that Clumio removes the complexity of infrastructure, cloud management, and snapshot orchestration altogether. To get up and running, all you need to do is a simple 15-minute setup that discovers all EBS volumes and sets up policies based on your existing tags and your backup is off and running! Imagine a world with no sizing, tuning, or cloud resource management required. You can scale on-demand to any size environment without needing to change anything. If you have 10s to 1000s of AWS accounts, you can discover them all and consistently protect them with the same policies with Clumio.

Costs are predictable, with per TB pricing and no financial surprises along the way. Snapshot prices, on the other hand, get out of control with long-term retention. Clumio provides all this advanced protection at up to 30 – 50% of the cost of EBS snapshots.  At 3 – 7 years of retention, expect upwards of 80 – 90% savings.

Global Search with Fine-Grain Restores

The main goal of data protection is easy restorations when you need the data back. For most enterprises, the majority of restores are single files but snapshots fall short and are riddled with complexity. In AWS, it requires an EBS volume to be created from an EBS snapshot which can take a while. Then you mount the EBS volume to an existing or new EC2 instance, search for the file in the filesystem and then finally restore the file. A large law firm recently said, “as you know, recovering full volumes just to get one file or figure out when the file changed is painful.” Not an elegant or fast process.

With Clumio, restorations can occur at the EBS volume, file, or even application level through tagging. Global file search is available with quick restores, which can be downloaded from S3 directly from the GUI without the need for the volumes to be attached. If you want to restore an entire volume, or if a disaster occurs, EBS volumes can be restored to any AWS account that is set up in Clumio, so you can get back up and running quickly.

Interested to see authentic SaaS simplicity in action? Check out this demo from our very own Adam Rusho:

We are very excited to show you our continued innovation and look forward to helping protect your data along your cloud journey. On your way to the cloud, don’t fall down; get backup with Clumio…….we are here for you. For more information on how Clumio can help your enterprise along your cloud journey, please reach out to us for an overview and demo.

Take care and stay “authentically” SaaSy my friends.