AWS Backup: Empowering Data Protection at Scale

Overview

• AWS Backup is a centralized data protection service that enables customers to protect their data across various AWS services.
• The service has seen significant growth, with over 140,000 customers protecting more than 2.9 exabytes of data.
• AWS Backup provides a policy-driven approach, allowing customers to define their data protection requirements and have the service handle the heavy lifting.

Key Use Cases

1. Cloud-native Backups: AWS Backup simplifies the backup process for services running natively on AWS.
2. Regulatory Compliance: AWS Backup helps customers in regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, financial services) meet compliance requirements by defining data protection strategies and generating compliance reports.
3. Disaster Recovery: AWS Backup enables multi-region backup strategies to ensure resilience against regional failures.
4. Cyber Resilience: AWS Backup recently introduced the Logically Air-gapped Vault feature to protect against ransomware and other cybersecurity threats.

Customer Journeys

Freddie Mac

• Freddie Mac, a leading secondary mortgage market company, adopted AWS Backup to address the following key drivers:
  • Centralized management of backups
  • Reduced recovery time objective
  • Immutable backup copies for operational resilience
  • Cross-region backup copies for disaster recovery
• Freddie Mac implemented a solution using AWS Backup, Audit Manager, and a "clean room" concept for data validation before restoration.
• Key lessons learned:
  • Tag-based inclusion of resources for simplified backup adoption
  • Cost optimization through S3 lifecycle policies and data exclusions
  • Importance of end-to-end recovery process validation

Skyscanner

• Skyscanner, a global travel search platform, faced the challenge of protecting essential operational data that was not adequately safeguarded.
• Skyscanner tackled this problem by:
  • Identifying all data stores and their owners
  • Defining a standard for criticality of data
  • Building a centralized backup solution using AWS Backup
• Skyscanner's solution included an intermediate vault to address encryption challenges and allowed service owners to define customized backup plans.
• Key learnings:
  • Backup requirements vary across data stores
  • Enabling low-friction onboarding requires additional safeguards
  • Streamlining the restore process by integrating with infrastructure-as-code workflows

Continuous Improvements

• AWS Backup continues to enhance its capabilities, including:
  • Improvements for S3 backups, allowing restoration of all versions
  • Expanded cross-region, cross-account backup capabilities
  • Enhancements to the AWS Backup cost calculator
• Future focus areas include:
  • Expanding the Logically Air-gapped Vault features
  • Improving the restore testing and validation capabilities

Conclusion

AWS Backup has emerged as a powerful and scalable data protection solution, empowering customers like Freddie Mac and Skyscanner to address a wide range of data protection use cases, from cloud-native backups to cyber resilience. The service's continuous improvements and customer-driven approach ensure that AWS Backup remains a valuable tool for enterprises in their data protection journeys.