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
- Cloud-native Backups: AWS Backup simplifies the backup process for services running natively on AWS.
- 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.
- Disaster Recovery: AWS Backup enables multi-region backup strategies to ensure resilience against regional failures.
- 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.