Why data protection in the cloud requires a backup-as-a-service model

Cloud software is becoming increasingly complex, making it increasingly difficult to monitor, backup and secure.

When you consider that the average cost of a data breach is in the public cloud $5 millionOrganizations are rethinking their data protection strategies in the cloud.

This has led to the backup-as-a-service (BaaS) model, which allows organizations to store data in the cloud, with providers providing and managing the necessary infrastructure, software and support services.

To help businesses back up and protect their data specific to the AWS, BaaS platform Clumio today released new data protection and backup capabilities for Amazon S3. AWS and Clumio will jointly demonstrate the new features at AWS again: Invent this week.

“Amazon S3 is becoming increasingly important to organizations and the internal data needs to be protected,” said Chadd Kenney, VP of product at Clumio.

However, S3, an object storage service that allows AWS cloud customers to store data anywhere, is a shared responsibility model that is not supported by AWS.

“They guarantee platform availability and handle issues like hardware failure,” said Kenney, “but you’re responsible for backing up your data.”

The growth of BaaS

The global BaaS market is expected to grow almost 18 billion dollars between 2022 and 2026, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 33%.

Amazon, for its part, has its own built-in backup capabilities that prevent overwriting or accidental deletion of data. Among which version management (maintain multiple object versions in the same bucket), replication (copy objects across S3 buckets) and object lock (save object via a write-once-read-a lot fashion model).

However, organizations are unable to restore S3 objects or an entire bucket to a point in time; they can only revert objects to one of their latest versions, Kenney said.

Clumio’s platform attempts to address four challenges with S3, he said: protection against accidental deletions; recovery from ransomware and cyber threats; adherence to compliance and SLA requirements (ISO 2700X, HIPAA, SOC 2); and reduction of AWS backup costs (storage expenses or lack of visibility of costs for data services and apps).

The platform protects data lakes on Amazon S3, databases such as Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, and application data infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 and EBS.

Granular protection

As Kenney noted, “S3 environments can be huge.” To that end, Clumio tested the platform to protect up to 30 billion objects per bucket.

Customers now get granular protection with continuous change logging for Amazon S3 with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of just 15 minutes, he said. RPO refers to the time interval that can elapse during an outage before the amount of lost data exceeds the maximum allowable thresholds.

The platform also has a recovery time target of zero (the extent of disruption to normal business operations and loss of revenue). This feature is now available for early access.

And with a data protection recommendation feature, customers can get a complete picture of their data environment on AWS, consolidate backups across multiple services under a unified air gap, and receive recommendations on how to optimize data protection costs. Clumio can also serve as an immutable (immutable) time machine copy for testing and development and analysis, Kenney said.

Larger scale, performance, analytics

Clumio competes in its space with AWS Backup, Druva, Acronis, Metallic, Veeam, and Rubrik.

The main differentiator, however, is Clumio’s architecture, Kenney said. While other platforms are built on a monolithic architecture, Clumio is built from scratch as a serverless data processing pipeline.

This orchestration engine is “almost like a Kubernetes for Lambda functions that divides ingestion and rehydration,” Kenney said. This has downstream implications for scale, performance and air gap networks.

Specifically, customers can protect what they need in detail, Kenney said. Usually this happens at the bucket level – and as a result, customers feel compelled to protect everything in that bucket, regardless of importance. Clumio customers also receive a calendar that references the date and time to restore to (instead of having to scroll through resource IDs).

Ultimately, Kenney said, “customers can keep their data secure and keep apps, analytics, and AI workloads running even in the event of an outage or outage.”