What’s new with AWS Backup (STG203)

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.

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