DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of its inaugural 2020-21 TOP 5 report on SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions. This TOP 5 report provides small and midsize 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 small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) (250 – 5,000 employees) running their application workloads on public cloud platforms continues to grow. Consider:
- 96 percent of organizations of all sizes already use at least one public cloud platform
- Public cloud platforms will host more than 50% of all enterprise workloads and data by 2021
- 87 percent of companies experience business acceleration from their use of cloud services
These statistics reflect what many anecdotally know to be true: SME 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 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market outdistancing its nearest competitor by more than 3:1.
SMEs select AWS over its competitors for many reasons. It offers over 100 platform services from basic compute, networking, and storage services to analytics, end user computing, and relational databases. It has data centers throughout the world. Taken together, these benefits make a compelling argument for SMEs to adopt and embrace AWS.
Backup Still a Requirement in the AWS Cloud
AWS offers many features SMEs want a public cloud platform to deliver including high availability, redundancy, security, and many more. Despite the benefits AWS offers, SMEs must keep one principle in mind: they continue to retain responsibility for their data.
This puts the onus on SMEs to back up and recover their data. Should their data get corrupted, deleted, lost, or encrypted, they need a solution in place to protect it.
AWS does offer its own backup software which DCIG evaluated in its research for this report. However, it is a separate offering optimized for virtual machine backup to which SMEs must subscribe. Many SMEs will have applications and data with backup and recovery requirements beyond what AWS’ own backup software offers. This will necessitate them to acquire a third-party solution to meet their AWS backup and recovery needs.
SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated sixteen SME 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:
- Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP)
- Arpio
- Cobalt Iron Compass
- Druva CloudRanger
- IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
Key Similarities
In reviewing these solutions, DCIG noted the TOP 5 solutions shared these characteristics to include:
- Available in all compatible AWS regions. All five of these TOP 5 providers make their respective AWS cloud backup solution available in all compatible AWS regions.
- May place backup data on S3 object stores in different AWS regions. SMEs may want to store backup data on S3 object stores in AWS regions other than where their applications reside. All TOP 5 solutions give SMEs the flexibility to implement this feature.
- Provide technical support in four hours or less. The responsiveness, levels, and types of technical support available from SME AWS cloud backup providers vary widely. All TOP 5 SME AWS cloud backup providers excel in this area providing technical support in four hours or less.
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:
- Deploying the solution. SMEs will need to assess if they have a preference in how they want to deploy and host the cloud backup solution. These options impact how quickly an SME can move from choosing a solution to using it in AWS.
- Protecting applications outside of the AWS cloud. SMEs may want to use the same solution to protect applications on-premises or SaaS-based cloud applications such as Microsoft Office 365. Three solutions offer an option to protect applications on-premises while another three can protect SaaS-based cloud applications.
- Protecting AWS applications. Many SMEs adopt AWS to use features it offers to which they may not have access in their on-premises infrastructure. These AWS features may include Autoscaling, Cloudwatch, Elastic Load Balancing, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
- Protecting AWS and non-AWS databases. While they differ in capabilities, these TOP 5 solutions give SMEs multiple options to protect either AWS or non-AWS databases. Three solutions protect AWS’ RDS databases while one can protect Aurora, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB, among others.
- Breadth of VM recovery options. SMEs wanting to use the backup software to recover VMs inside or outside of AWS will need to choose carefully. Only three TOP 5 solutions offer SMEs the option to perform virtual-to-virtual (V2V) recoveries.
Report Availability
The full DCIG 2020-21 TOP 5 SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions report is available for download immediately on a trusted third-party site. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all sixteen solutions evaluated
- Next-generation SME AWS cloud backup features
- AWS cloud backup features that all SME 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 SME 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 SME 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 Arcserve’s website which has licensed this report and made it available at no cost.
DCIG 2020-21 TOP 5 SME 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.