Finding the Right Tool for the Job
One of the roles of the Cloud SE at Clumio is to help customers model their current AWS data protection strategy and the cost of utilizing this strategy. Most of the info required to build a model is familiar: How much data do you protect? How often do you back it up? How long do you retain it? Do you copy your backups to another account to ensure air-gap security? As we begin diving into data gathering, customers quickly become lost with no idea where to look in the AWS console. This gets further complicated when they have to gather this data across accounts and regions. Several consoles to different accounts are opened and we are looking at snapshot inventories, billing dashboards, cost explorer and many other tools to collect the answers to these questions. Once we find the data points we are looking for, we then aggregate data into detailed Excel spreadsheets and make pretty Powerpoint slides from bar graphs for review by the bosses. AWS does a fantastic job of providing the data points but it is up to the customer to find relevant data, aggregate, validate and create their own visual models from this information. Now that Clumio has introduced Discover, this entire process is built into a simple to use dashboard with several visuals that automatically generate required reports. My job has become much easier, plus we are no longer burning a ton of valuable resources and time.
When it comes to restoring data, customers look through hundreds of AWS snapshots in order to find what they need. The restore could have been requested by a sysadmin who accidentally deleted a file; a compliance officer who needs proof of database record retention; or in what used to be a rare case, a ransomware attack. One of Clumio’s newest customers had an incident where a sysadmin accidentally stopped and terminated a few production EC2 instances. The sysadmin searched through a list of snapshots, via the AWS console, trying to find the correct snapshots to use for restoration. After a few failed attempts they let management know that a part of production was down and it was taking longer than expected to restore the lost instances. The manager in charge of data protection said something to the effect of “no worries, we have Clumio, we can get the instances back quickly”. A few clicks later, via the simplified calendar view in the Clumio Protect dashboard, the team was able to rapidly restore their data from Clumio’s air-gapped backups that were occurring every 4 hours. The entire recovery process was completed within 15 minutes. AWS provides a huge toolbox but finding the right tool to do the job takes several tries, especially when you are a journeyman and not a master craftsman.
Clumio provides a map that overlays the set of tools AWS provides to customers. Via Clumio Discover we make it easy to drill into the data footprint of the different AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS, and DynamoDB that you use. It is free to use even if you are already the customer of another AWS protection vendor. Simply connect your AWS accounts to Clumio Discover, non-invasively and read-only, and the tool will automatically create easy to understand visualizations of your asset counts, capacity footprints, and snapshot retention. Clumio Discover makes it very easy to determine if you are meeting application SLAs and whether or not you are meeting compliance requirements.
On top of all this goodness are cost analysis visuals of your current data protection strategy. Discover can analyze and provide estimated savings possible by using Clumio Protect service in comparison to your current strategy. If you are looking to expand and simplify your data protection capabilities, Clumio Protect provides Ransomware protection via air-gap secure backups of your AWS data which can easily be restored at a file, directory, or instance granularity – across the accounts or regions (coming soon) of your choice. With a combination of Clumio Discover and Protect you become the master craftsman that selects the right tool out of the toolbox to get the job done.
When you are ready to jump from journeyman to craftsman, you can connect Clumio Discover to your AWS accounts via AWS Marketplace. It’s free, even if you are currently utilizing a different vendor to protect your AWS services!
