Solving The Challenges of AWS Backup

The cloud offers several benefits for enterprises looking to gain access to better technology, faster innovation, and an IT structure that is easier to manage. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has quickly become the easy default cloud backup choice for many businesses looking to protect their data in the cloud.

Although AWS backup services certainly provides plenty of its own benefits in terms of versatility, it also has certain shortcomings that prevent it from being a comprehensive solution—not to mention offering only marginal control over cloud costs.

Here are five of the primary challenges AWS backup presents when used on its own.

Five Common Challenges of Using AWS Backup

No Ransomware Protection

Ransomware has become a prevailing threat to enterprises of all types and sizes, with costs forecasted to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Security experts estimate that one ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. How can you effectively protect your data and ideally avoid a ransomware scenario altogether? Or even ensure that you can recover quickly from an attack?

When enterprises use AWS Backup to protect data sources such as S3, EC2, EBS, and RDS, snapshots are automatically created and kept in the same account as the primary data, leaving no separation between the primary data and snapshots.

This means that if a hacker gains access to the primary account, they can easily compromise the snapshots before moving onto the primary data.

Once the primary data has been compromised, there are no longer any backups to restore from—the enterprise’s data has been completely locked. They are now at the mercy of the hackers, who may still keep or destroy the data even after receiving the ransom payment.

Long Recovery Times

Backup is not the only aspect of the data protection equation; data recovery is equally important. If an enterprise’s primary data gets corrupted—be it from bad actors or data failure—it has to have a way to recover the data as fast as possible to avoid significant disruptions to business continuity and its end users.

The lack of visibility into snapshots can lead to costly delays in recovery. Without a precise form of granular recovery, restoring data from an AWS backup can require a substantial amount of time due to the complex process of identifying which data needs to be restored and in what order.

Limited Visibility

The lack of visibility into snapshots within AWS doesn’t just affect recovery time, it can also complicate proving backup compliance with auditors and insurers. Furthermore, maintaining consistent policies across all applications and accounts is difficult and time-consuming when there is limited visibility into snapshots.

Additional Complexity

The basic out-of-the-box capabilities of AWS backup can lead to ongoing complexities that require constant attention from IT teams and their resources. For example, IT teams have to routinely write complex scripts to add any missing functionalities into their data protection solution.

Such scenarios work against the goal of cloud computing in the first place, which is to leverage the speed and agility of the cloud. If you constantly have to devote extra resources just to keep AWS cloud backup running smoothly, you’re not being efficient.

Unpredictable Costs

Aside from ensuring a reliable, secure data backup and recovery system, enterprises also turn to cloud backup to gain cost-efficiencies. At first glance, the TCO with AWS backup can seem reasonable, but expenses can begin to pile up—sometimes exponentially over time.

This is due to the standard snapshot replication and storage process within AWS backup. Snapshots are replicated for long-term retention across accounts, resulting in higher backup costs.

Additional egress charges for any cross-account transfers can further increase these costs, all of which will snowball over time, catching many enterprises off guard.

Why Clumio is the Solution to AWS Backup Challenges

Clumio was specifically designed to meet the various challenges enterprises can encounter when using AWS backup. The cloud-native platform provides seamless AWS backup and recovery through an intuitive interface that requires no additional hardware or software to run.

With Clumio, enterprises receive:

• Best-in-Class Security that provides air-gapped and immutable backups that are end-to-end encrypted—to provide protection against threats like ransomware and bad actors

• Rapid Recovery via a granular approach that quickly locates and restores backup files and can cut restore time from several hours to just minutes

• Better Visibility into your data protection plans and compliance status to ensure you’re meeting business requirements

• Simpler Backup Management with features like global policies and protection groups that automate long-term data retention as well as data classification

• Lower TCO thanks to no longer needing to install additional resources, pay egress charges, devote additional IT resources to manage the process, or make mirror copies of snapshots— reducing backup costs by up to 50%

Want to learn more? Click here to download our ebook, “The Definitive Guide to Backing Up Data in AWS,” where you can read more into the problems AWS can offer with cloud backup—and how Clumio solves each one.

Ready to give Clumio a try? You can be up and running with Clumio in just 15 minutes. Click here to learn how you can test drive Clumio free for 14 days.