Achieving Regulatory Compliance With Cloud Backup

Regulatory compliance is complicated. Organizations of all sizes can often have difficulty meeting compliance requirements, especially when considering the fluidity of the requirements themselves.

HIPAA, PCI, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Europe’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) all pose their own challenges when it comes to regulatory compliance and data retention due to the complexity and variance across state and international lines. For example, there is a minimum six-year federal retention period for HIPAA-protected records, but state-level requirements range anywhere from five to ten years.

Regardless of the complexities (and seeming inconsistencies) with compliance regulations, the burden is always on the organization to meet them.

 

The Shared Responsibility Model of Regulatory Compliance

Most cloud providers—including AWS—operate with what’s known as a shared responsibility model. This means that while the cloud provider is responsible for complying with regulations regarding their infrastructure and platform, the entity using the cloud provider is on the hook for satisfying regulations related to how they use cloud services, host applications, and data storage.

This model also applies to security. The cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud (i.e., cloud service infrastructure), while the organization is responsible for security in the cloud (i.e., applications, software or utilities installed by the customer on the instances, access to the endpoints used to store and retrieve data, and management of data).

And that’s not all. The user also has to classify assets and use identity and access management (IAM) tools to apply any appropriate permissions and adhere to service-level agreements (SLAs) with customers.

 

Hidden Costs And Outdated Manual Compliance Methods

Inefficient methods of maintaining regulatory compliance can result in hidden costs that snowball over time and lead to an unsustainable amount of overhead—especially when using snapshots as a backup strategy. This approach creates the need to store several snapshots volumes, increasing storage costs incrementally as more time passes.

Some may opt for a manual policy for compliance management, which typically relies on multiple tools or manually-written scripts to create and maintain a set of policies. But this method can grow increasingly complex and burdensome to maintain. It also leaves ample room for human error, which may eventually derail an organization’s compliance and expose it to severe ramifications.

The Right Cloud Backup Can Remove the Complexity and Risks of Compliance

There’s certainly a lot at stake with compliance. If your organization experiences compliance failure for any reason—such as via cyber attack, like ransomware—you could be hit with fines, lose customer trust, and sustain long-term damage to your reputation.

Fortunately, maintaining compliance doesn’t have to be complex, even as data retention laws continue to change and evolve.

Clumio is a fully secure, cloud backup-as-a-service solution that delivers compliance-driven data retention via hands-off automation. By leveraging industry-leading innovation, the platform defines backup policies and monitors compliance in real-time across your organization’s entire AWS environment.

Clumio’s features include:

• A simple interface that offers a single, cohesive view of all your AWS assets
• The ability to automatically discover AWS accounts and index existing and future resources with the same uniform policies
• Instant alerts when compliance is at risk
• ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS certifications
• Air-gapped storage of backups outside of production environments, ensuring protection against threats such as ransomware and bad-actor attacks
• Predictable cloud backup and data storage costs coupled with a Pay-As-You-Go consumption model that allows rollover credits

Remove the complexity and overspending that often comes with maintaining compliance for your organization. See for yourself why Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for AWS cloud backup. Schedule a demo today to learn how your organization can be fully protected by Clumio in less than 15 minutes—without the need to install any new infrastructure or software.