Understanding the AWS Data Protection Market

Organizations should keep a backup of applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unlike on-premises applications where the primary concern is disaster recovery, the primary motivation for protecting cloud-native applications is recovery from cyber-attacks, rogue users or application faults. Each of these recovery conditions requires a cold, isolated copy of data. While these conditions are common, the organization should still prepare for less common conditions, like an entire AWS region suffering an outage. IT needs to make sure that if a region is unavailable that it can recover in another region, quickly and seamlessly.

Deciding on an AWS Backup Solution

The first challenge for IT is convincing organizational leadership that AWS backup is required; the second is selecting a solution. The AWS marketplace has evolved from almost no data protection solutions to many. While choice is always good, IT now has to examine all its options to see which is best for the organization. Many solutions only put a pretty face on AWS’ built-in snapshots. Since a critical reason for recovery is protection from cyber-attack or a rogue user, the backup solution should make sure its configuration files and the copies of data it makes are secure. It should also provide infrastructure management to help manage the backup and recovery process.

Introducing Cloud Daddy 1.2

We covered Cloud Daddy in our recent briefing note “Why Protect Data in the Cloud?.” The solution is an infrastructureless, cloud-native application that runs as an Amazon EC2 instance. It builds on Amazon’s basic data protection capabilities (snapshots) and provides for an easier way to protect an organization’s cloud applications and data.

In version 1.2 Cloud Daddy adds a unique Disaster Recovery Orchestration Dashboard. The DR dashboard provides the ability to visualize the backup and replications contained within AWS regions anywhere within the AWS global footprint. IT can filter and drill down to locate a specific backup copy to restore, and the solution now provides the flexibility to recover a workload to the same AWS account/region, or to an alternate account/region within AWS.

As we noted in our last briefing note, Cloud Daddy can also backup between accounts. The destination account can be set to minimal access, making it almost impossible for a cyber-attack to hit both accounts.

In addition to the Disaster Recovery Orchestration, snapshots created as the result of backup jobs are created with the same name as the initial volume name, making it easier to identify recovery points. The solution also now provides individual file recovery and entire folder recovery. IT downloads recovered folders as a single ZIP file. Additionally, version 1.2 includes the ability to backup and restore DynamoDB objects. It also adds the ability to automatically disable jobs at certain times like during regular working hours.

StorageSwiss Take

The AWS Backup Market is suddenly getting crowded. Several legacy backup vendors have purchased AWS specific backup solutions to add to their portfolio, but these remain standalone solutions and are almost solely focused on backing up data. Cloud Daddy is unique in that it provides enhanced security and infrastructure management in addition to backup, providing modern data protection for today’s world.

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