DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of its inaugural TOP 5 report on Enterprise AWS Cloud Backup Solutions. This TOP 5 report provides large enterprises guidance on the best backup solutions for backing up and recovering applications and data hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
AWS a Major Beneficiary of Enterprise Public Cloud Adoption
The percentage of companies running their application workloads on public cloud platforms continues to grow. Consider:
- 30 percent of corporate application workloads currently run on public cloud platforms
- Public cloud platforms will host more than 50% of enterprise workloads and data by 2021
- Most companies expect to accelerate public cloud usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic
These statistics reflect what other surveys also say: enterprise adoption of public cloud platforms continues to grow unabated. Among these platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) represents one of this trend’s primary beneficiaries. AWS already owns nearly 50% of the public cloud platform market and outdistances its nearest competitor by more than 3:1.
Backup Still a Requirement in the AWS Cloud
AWS offers many features enterprises want from a public cloud platform including high availability, redundancy, security, and many more. Despite all the benefits AWS offers, large enterprises must keep one principle in mind: they retain responsibility for their data.
This puts the onus on large enterprises to back up and recover their data. Should their data get corrupted, deleted, lost, or encrypted by ransomware, they need a solution in place to protect it.
AWS does offer its own backup software. However, it is a separate offering optimized for virtual machine backup to which enterprises must subscribe. Many large enterprises will have applications and data requiring specific backup and recovery features beyond what AWS’s backup software offers. This will necessitate them to acquire a third-party solution that meets their AWS backup and recovery needs.
Enterprise AWS Cloud Backup Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated thirteen enterprise AWS cloud backup solutions based on multiple different features and capabilities. The general categories under which these features fell included:
- Backup administration
- Backup capabilities
- Configuration, licensing, and pricing
- Recovery and restores
- Snapshot administration
- Support
Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following enterprise backup solutions a TOP 5 ranking:
- Cobalt Iron Compass
- Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery
- IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
- Unitrends Backup
- Veritas NetBackup
Key Similarities
In reviewing these solutions, DCIG noted the TOP 5 solutions shared these characteristics to include:
- Index protected data. Each solution indexes the data it protects to provide this visibility and compliance that enterprises seek.
- Options to take frequent snapshots. To meet varying RPO and RTO requirements, every TOP 5 solution may create application snapshots as frequently as every 15 minutes. Further, they all recognize and integrate with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) to create and store these snapshots.
- Protect VMware applications running in VMware Cloud on AWS. Each of these TOP 5 solutions gives enterprises the flexibility to protect the VMware applications running in VMware Cloud on AWS.
Key Differences
The Top 5 solutions also differ in some ways in how they respectively back up and recover applications and data in the AWS cloud. These differences include:
- Automated VM conversion to AMI-compliant VMs. Although all these solutions perform VM backup, they do not yet all automatically convert protected VMs to Amazon Machine Image (AMI) compliant VMs.
- Available as a SaaS offering. Only two of these TOP 5 solutions make their software available as SaaS offerings.
- Integration with single sign-on (SSO) solutions. Three of the TOP 5 solutions have already integrated their software with various SSO offerings.
- Backup solution management interface. Four TOP 5 solutions integrate with third-party cloud management software such as CloudAware, CloudCheckr, or ServiceNow.
- Protection of AWS databases. If enterprises currently use any AWS databases, they will need to verify the solution can back up and recover them.
Report Availability
The full TOP 5 report is available for download immediately on a trusted third-party site. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all thirteen solutions evaluated
- Next-generation enterprise AWS cloud backup features
- AWS cloud backup features that all enterprise AWS cloud backup solutions share
- A deeper explanation of the key similarities and differences between the TOP 5 solutions
- A profile of each TOP 5 enterprise AWS cloud backup solution that lists the ways it distinguishes itself from the other solutions
Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts from this report published in this announcement, the contents of the DCIG 2020-21 TOP Enterprise AWS Cloud Backup Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Individuals may access the full report by following the link below to Cobalt Iron’s website which has licensed this report and made it available at no cost.
DCIG 2020-21 TOP 5 Enterprise AWS Cloud Backup Solutions Report
DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks and months to come. To be apprised of these announcements, and if you have not already done so, please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter so we may notify you of their availability.