Feature Friday – August 27, 2021
The pace of innovation is inspiring! It is so much fun to hear customer’s challenges and quickly deliver a solution that changes the customer experience. A customer was laughing yesterday saying, “I feel like if I blink, I might have a good chance of missing some new innovation from Clumio.” To ensure no innovation is missed, we decided a few weeks back to announce a new Innovations Series to keep everyone up to date on all the new innovations available to our customers. With that, welcome to the first edition of our New Feature Friday, where we review the constantly evolving innovation to enable a new data protection experience in the public cloud.
To start off, I figured we would cover the NPS quote of the month. We haven’t certified our NPS, which will come in time, but instead, we ask the simple question in a popup in our app that says “would you recommend Clumio to a friend or colleague?” Our current average is a 92, but we are just getting started, and one thing is for sure – our customers love our backup as a service offering and we don’t need an NPS score to realize that. Anyways, the best quote of the week is the following: “You all have made my backup process so simple that I could teach my 14-year-old how to do it. I never have to worry about the “what if” like I used to.” I love this! Innovation changing the customer experience!
Okay, now let’s dig into the new innovation!
Advanced Restore Workflow: Transparent Data Access
Clumio provides one of the most secure backup as a service offerings in the industry and we are always looking for new ways to provide additional security options for our most advanced customers. Transparent Data Access (TDA) is a new feature that provides an additional layer of security for the restore workflows. Very similar to a lockbox in a bank, you’ll need to present your key, followed by the banker using his key to unlock the box. Your valuables are stored safely inside the locker and you don’t need to worry about the safety of the locker/bank. Even if the banker wants, he can never access the lockbox by himself without your key as well.
The TDA feature from Clumio is built on similar principles! The data being backed up in Clumio is air-gapped and customers need not worry about its safety and security. With TDA, the backup or cloud operations admin can help the end users restore their data, without opening up access to the admin.
Here is how it works!
During the restore flow, via a global search or browse and restore function, the backup or cloud operations admin has two options: direct download or the end user email address and a link is shared with the end users (TDA).
This link is the only mechanism to access the data being restored. At the same time, the helpdesk or cloud operations admin gets a temporary one-time key that needs to be shared with the end users to access the restored data.
The end user receives an email with a download link that requires the secure passcode provided by the admin to proceed. You then input the passcode and the file can be downloaded.
Even if someone accidentally got the email or it was forwarded, they still won’t be able to access the data without the key. This provides multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access the restored data and ensures that the helpdesk or cloud operations admin cannot get access to the data directly! All of these actions are always logged into audit logs and can be streamed directly into your SIEM solution to ensure data doesn’t get leaked.
More Efficient Deployment — VPC and ASG Removal
Our initial deployment model deployed a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Auto Scaling Group (ASG) in the customer’s account, to process the data before it is sent directly to an S3 endpoint in the Clumio backup as a service. While this worked great, yesterday we released a massive improvement to the way we deploy the Clumio stack in customer environments. With this innovation, Clumio is now 100% infrastructure-free and continues to be 100% agentless! No need to manage EC2 instances, VPCs, ASGs, or even networks.
While this has greatly simplified an already simple deployment, it has also supercharged the backup and recovery of EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
We’re now making full use of AWS’s EBS Direct APIs. While our data recoveries are already the fastest in the business, this change significantly improves the overall experience. Customers will now see up to 3x faster backups and up to 40% faster restore time with speeds up to 350 MB/s per volume!
Stay tuned for our next feature Friday with more innovation!
Until next time, stay SaaSy my friends! NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN!!
