DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of its 2022-23 TOP 5 report on AWS Cloud Backup Solutions. This TOP 5 report provides small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) guidance on the best backup solutions for backing up and recovering applications, data, and workloads they host in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The full report may be accessed at no charge with registration on DCIG’s website by following this link.
AWS Maintains Its Cloud Leadership Position
Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure continues to experience double-digit growth. Between 2021 and 2022, spending in the overall cloud market grew by 29 percent.
Of the monies spent on cloud infrastructure, a recent survey of cloud market spending found AWS remained the cloud market leader with 34 percent market share. Equally notable, AWS grew its market share one percent quarter over quarter even as its competitors declined or stayed the same.
Enterprises select AWS over its competitors for many reasons. It offers a wide range of compute instances and storage types available at multiple capacity, performance, and price points. It provides complementary cloud services such as analytics, artificial intelligence, containers, Internet of Things (IoT), and Kubernetes, plus many more. It currently has 84 Availability Zones with data centers in 26 geographic regions with announced plans to add more.
Taken together, these benefits make a compelling argument for enterprises to adopt and embrace AWS. Yet as enterprises host more applications, data, and workloads in AWS, they must also take steps to protect them.
The State of SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions
AWS cloud backup offerings fall broadly into two categories: backup software deployed on VMs and backup-as-a-service (BaaS). However, some AWS cloud backup providers offer both.
Backup software deployed on VMs takes an approach comparable to performing on-premises backup. Enterprises obtain an appropriately sized Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance from AWS to host the backup software. They license, install, and maintain the backup solution themselves. They configure it to back up their applications hosted in AWS. In many respects, they manage this backup software in AWS the same way they do now.
In the BaaS category, enterprises subscribe to the BaaS to back up their applications and data in the AWS cloud. The BaaS provider then performs the BaaS’s ongoing infrastructure maintenance, such as fixes, patches, and updates. This approach frees enterprises to focus solely on backups and recoveries without needing to perform maintenance on the underlying backup software.
When DCIG last evaluated AWS cloud backup solutions in 2020, backup software deployed on VMs typically won out. At that time, BaaS lacked many features that SMEs frequently required to justifiably adopt and deploy backup in AWS.
Fast forward to 2022 and the script has flipped. BaaS solutions have closed the gap with well-designed, full-featured BaaS offerings available. Further, SMEs better understand the challenges of scaling and managing backup software running on EC2 instances in the AWS cloud. As a result, fewer SMEs want to continue down that path.
These factors contribute to the 2022 list of TOP 5 SME AWS cloud backup solutions looking different than 2020. The biggest difference shows up in that SMEs may obtain any of the TOP 5 AWS backup solutions as a BaaS. This minimizes the need for enterprises to consider backup solutions which run on EC2 instances that they must deploy and manage. They can now frequently get the backup and recovery functionality they need from a BaaS solution.
While these improvements in AWS BaaS solutions position enterprises to choose BaaS, differences between these solutions remain. Some products:
- Focus their protection capabilities on non-native AWS applications and data
- Give SMEs a choice in where they store backups and how they may perform recoveries
- Host their BaaS outside of AWS.
- Provide all their features in certain AWS regions
- Provide options to store backups on Amazon S3 storage
The different strengths of these BaaS offerings dictate that SMEs should not treat these offerings as interchangeable for their AWS cloud backup needs. These products possess different strengths and enterprises should make sure their strengths align with their specific data protection needs.
SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG identified over 30 solutions in the marketplace that offer backup capabilities for AWS. Of these, DCIG identified and classified twelve of them as meeting DCIG’s definition of a small and midsized enterprise AWS cloud backup solution. These twelve solutions meet the specific backup and recovery needs of SMEs.
DCIG evaluated these 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
- Support
Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following enterprise backup solutions a TOP 5 ranking:
- Arpio Disaster Recovery and Readiness
- Amazon AWS Backup
- Clumio Protect
- HYCU Protege for AWS
- Metallic, a Commvault Venture
Shared Characteristics
In reviewing these TOP 5 solutions, DCIG noted they shared the following characteristics:
- Operate in the North America and Europe AWS regions
- Integrate with and protect the following AWS EC2 guest operating systems: Amazon Linux, RHEL, SUSE Linux, and all current Windows releases (2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022)
- Encrypt data at-rest and in-flight
- May be configured to perform snapshots at least once a day
- Can perform granular restores of VM images
- Can create snapshots on Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
- Offer protection for Microsoft SQL Server
- Perform cloud-to-cloud (C2C) recoveries
- Provide technical support in one hour or less
- Offer AWS CloudFormation templates to aid in the deployment and/or use of their solution
Report Availability
The full TOP 5 report is available for download immediately at no charge with registration on DCIG’s website by following this link.. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all twelve backup solutions evaluated
- AWS cloud backup features that all SME AWS cloud backup solutions share
- The differences between the TOP 5 SME AWS cloud backup solutions
- A profile of each TOP 5 SME AWS cloud backup solution that lists the ways it differentiates itself from the other solutions
Other than excerpts from this report published in this announcement, the contents of the DCIG 2022-23 TOP 5 SME AWS Cloud Backup Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Individuals may access the full report by following this link and completing the required registration information.
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.