Data protection providers always have a substantial presence at the annual AWS re:Invent conference. While they exhibit there for multiple reasons, one stands out. Organizations moving their production applications and data into AWS for the first time present a green field opportunity for these providers.
Yet as organizations consider the various AWS data protection options available, they may find they need more than one. In fact, they may need four or more solutions to properly protect their applications and data hosted in AWS.
The AWS Data Protection Conundrum
AWS hosts all types of organizational applications, data, and workloads. Some of these were born in AWS. Other organizations have shifted their existing applications, data, and workloads to AWS. Still other organizations manage a hybrid environment with applications, data, and workloads running both in AWS and on-premises. Some may simply store data on AWS S3 cloud storage. Further, these four scenarios likely do not capture all the ways in which organizations engage with AWS.
Regardless of how organizations engage AWS, all these engagement types may necessitate they protect their applications, data, and workloads hosted there. This becomes the conundrum that organizations knowingly or, unknowingly, face.
Each engagement type may necessitate using a specific data protection solution to appropriately protect it. Adding to the difficulty, no single AWS data protection provider or solution yet offers all the data protection options that an organization may need.
4 Shades of AWS Data Protection
Obtaining the most appropriate data protection solution, or combination of data protection solutions, requires organizations to understand each solution’s capabilities. The four scenarios listed below highlight some of the primary differentiators between available products. This list also illustrates why organizations may need multiple data protection solutions.
- Protection of AWS application data. A new generation of organizations exists that has applications, data, and workloads that were born in the AWS cloud. These applications and workloads utilize and store data in AWS’ various databases. To protect this data, they typically need data protection solutions tuned specifically for AWS. These organizations may find themselves well-served by AWS’ own AWS Backup offering.
- Recovery of entire AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Organizations may not often consider their AWS VPC going offline but it can and does happen, as discussed here. While rare, merely having a backup of your VPC’s applications and data may not suffice. To bring a VPC back online in the same or another region, an organization needs all the metadata associated with all the services in that VPC. To perform this type of backup and recovery, organizations should look to solutions such as Arpio.
- Protecting applications, workloads, and their data migrated to and now hosted in AWS. When organizations migrate applications and workloads, few if any re-architect them before re-hosting them in AWS. Many simply perform a lift-and-shift and replace their on-premises physical or virtual infrastructure with AWS’ virtual infrastructure.
This lift-and-shift, however, typically also requires an organization to take their backup applications with them into AWS. However, each data protection solution will vary in how well it does backups once it gets hosted in AWS. Further, this data protection solution should also provide options to protect the metadata generated by AWS’ various services. Few, if any, offer these capabilities.
DCIG currently finds HYCU Protégé to be one of the better data protection solutions to protect on-premises physical, on-premises virtual, and AWS environments. Further, it operates as a cloud service across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, one of the few if not the only one to do so.
- Protecting data stored in Amazon S3. Protecting data that organizations store in Amazon S3 may not sound sexy or exciting. In fact, some may wonder, “Why protect it at all? Isn’t all data stored in S3 often backed up anyway?”
While there may be some truth to that second question, the full answer to it is, “No.” Organizations hosting applications in and out of AWS store data in S3 object storage and, in some cases, vast amounts of data for production applications. If the data changes frequently or expands to multiple petabytes, the costs associated with storing the data in S3 may become prohibitive. So they need to back it up, archive it, or both to more cost-effective media such as tape or on-premises storage.
These organizations need a data protection solution tuned for protecting high amounts of data stored in AWS S3. For this scenario, DCIG deems Clumio as one of the best options to handle the protection of S3 data.
No One Solution Yet Exists for Comprehensive AWS Data Protection
Organizations ideally want to select a single solution that comprehensively protects their AWS environment. However, as of today, that solution does not exist. Further, I do not yet even see one on the horizon that fully addresses every data protection requirement an organization has now or may have in the future.
Due to this reality organizations must map their needs to today’s available AWS data protection solutions. While none will meet every data protection requirement an organization may possess, used in combination they may meet most of them. That is the best an organization can currently attain, and will likely remain the case for the foreseeable future.
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About DCIG
The Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG) empowers the IT industry with actionable analysis. DCIG analysts provide informed third-party analysis of various cloud, data protection, and data storage technologies. DCIG’s audiences include C-level executives, IT managers, IT professionals, magazine editors, bloggers, analysts, and providers within the IT and cloud services industry with DCIG reaching millions of these individuals each year through its publications.