Revolutionizing AWS RDS Backup with Clumio BaaS

Remember long ago how excited you were about getting the nice bundle with 250 channels, a phone line, and internet when signing up for cable? I remember thinking, “this is great, I am getting such an awesome deal for all these services.” Fast forward a few years. I never watch more than 5 channels, never connected a phone to the phone line, and the internet speeds no longer keep up. I realized I was paying for many things, yet getting little to no value. I finally cut the cord and, the funny part is, I now pay less, get more value, and have a much better user experience.

But this pay less, get more value and better user experience is not the reality for many enterprises when protecting AWS EBS and RDS data. Snapshots alone are expensive, open to vulnerabilities, and make data retrieval painful. But today, Clumio is delighted to be able to solve this customer challenge and help you accelerate your journey to the cloud.

We are excited to announce the Industry’s First Data Protection Service for Long-Term Retention and Compliance of AWS Native Services, including a FREE service tier for operational recovery.

 

Clumio now supports VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS, Microsoft 365, Amazon EBS, and Amazon RDS, enabling customers to use a single service to protect their data no matter where they are on their cloud journey. Clumio for RDS delivers protection from data loss and ransomware, cost-effective compliance, and granular record retrieval. More value at lower costs is now achievable for AWS data protection.

But be careful out there. Many legacy vendors such as Rubrik and Cohesity started announcing new “snapshot managers” disguised as data protection solutions. In reality, these “snapshot managers” do nothing but add additional cost on top of the already high costs of existing snapshots yet provide only the same functionality found natively in Amazon RDS. Charging for this capability is robbery. In our view, things that offer no value should be provided for free and snapshot managers are no exception. It kind of reminds me of the phone line included with every cable service. I am sure I am paying for it, but it brought no value to me whatsoever.

So forget about those guys! Let’s dive deep into better data protection for RDS and how Clumio goes way beyond snapshots to protect against data loss and ransomware, reduce cost for long-term retention and enable a completely new customer experience for granular record recovery.

Protect Against Data Loss and Ransomware

Clumio Backup as a Service for RDS delivers an authentic data protection service that protects data outside of customers’ many AWS accounts in a consistent way. This ‘air gap’ reduces vulnerability to ransomware and data loss due to external or internal bad actors. An air gap is standard protocol in the data center when enterprises store data offsite to protect site intrusion. In the cloud, enterprises tend to forget about this and leave all of their eggs in their AWS account. With Clumio, data is protected for operational recovery by AWS snapshots with the free tier of our service -something our snapshot manager friends provide at additional cost to you. Delivering the same functionality for free enables Clumio to focus on what enterprises value more – lower TCO for long-term retention and compliance.

We also built a rolling backup capability for Amazon RDS into the Clumio service to mitigate an account compromise. Think of rolling backup to be like a standby replica of your RDS instance. Unlike a traditional replica, it is air-gapped away in the Clumio service and is time-lagged from your production by a maximum of 24 hours. The time-lag is to ensure that the replica is not inheriting the infection from the compromised production instance. You can recover from a rolling backup to the same account once the breach is resolved or to an alternate account while the original is kept intact for digital forensics.

Reduce Costs for Long-Term Retention

Rising costs for long-term retention are one of the main reasons a cloud journey can hit a roadblock. On-premises data protection had snapshots, data backup (separate product), and compliance backup which was typically tape in Iron Mountain. This made long-term retention much more palatable because the per terabyte costs of retention went down over time. The high costs of snapshots shock most, but using snapshots for long-term backup and compliance in the cloud is nuts because per terabyte costs of retention go up over time. You would never use snapshots for 1 or 7 years of backup on-premises.

Clumio Backup as a Service for RDS and EBS reduces cost up to 50% for long-term data retention. You might be wondering, how is this possible? Well, remember EBS and RDS snapshots are not cheap at $.05 and $.095 per GB per month respectively. RDS is even more painful with replication of snapshots resulting in full copies of the data that must be retained. Clumio provides predictable costs on a per provisioned terabyte basis to ensure data protection costs are well understood for long-term retention.

Reduce the Complexity of Granular Record Restores
Protecting data safely and cost-effectively is only half the battle. The other half is actually accessing it when needed. With traditional backup, you always had file-level restores which gave you restore granularity to pull one file versus an entire volume or virtual machine. But with RDS snapshots, you are stuck with the painful process of restoring the entire instance from a snapshot, paying for the instance while restoring, and then making sure to tear it down afterward. This makes compliance audits, legal hold and eDiscovery impossible without a painstaking, error-prone process.

With Clumio, you no longer need to relive that nightmare. With granular record retrieval, Clumio enables you to search for desired records directly from backups and download it easily in a transportable non-proprietary format. Simply download and hand it over to auditors or legal counsel and you are done.

Now is the time to ditch your snapshot manager and accelerate your journey to the public cloud with Clumio’s backup as a service for Amazon EBS and RDS. With Clumio, you can reduce your costs for long-term retention by 50%, protect your data from data loss and ransomware, and change the user experience using granular record retrieval to easily access your backup data. Less cost, more value. We cannot wait to see what you do with it!

Until next time, stay SaaSy my friends.