Data Backup Digest

Earlier this year, Amazon AWS launched Backup. There was nothing surprising about the announcement, apart from the fact that it hadn’t come sooner. Amazon are a giant in a lot of industries and they’ve been making big strides when it comes to cloud computing. Their new Backup tool will make it easier for developers on their platform to keep their data safe on AWS services and on-premises apps.

The service lets you set backup policies for various services, including Amazon EBS volumes, DynamoDB tables, AWS Storage Gateway volumes, and more. That latter service will help when it comes to backing up on-premises data.

AWS Backup lets users set their policies and retention periods and stores the data in Amazon S3 buckets as standard. It also gives the option to move backups to cold storage after a certain amount of time. Or delete them entirely, if the data is no longer needed.

This integrates with AWS Tags, which can be used to set the policies. It also integrates with AWS Control Tower for account management service, meaning that AWS can control the entire backup and restore routine.

The aforementioned existing services, and the others, previously supported the ability to create snapshots. What Backup does is automates that process and applies rules to it. As such, pricing for Backup follows suit. The only difference is in the file system backup, which charges per GB.

Bill Vass, AWS’s VP of Storage, Automation and Management Services, notes that the cloud has become the default choice for businesses of all sizes. However, it attracts two different types of “builders”.

“Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine-tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster,” he said. “We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services.”

The introduction of AWS’ own backup service might prove troubling for independent suppliers like Acronis, Commvault and Veeam, all of whom have developed in-cloud backup services for AWS. Considering the convenience of users opting in to the service that AWS now offers within the platform itself, it’s going to a tough sell for third-parties to break through. However, those services do offer additional features that AWS Backup doesn’t currently, like pushing into Azure, so they will need to continue to innovate in order to stand out.

For those who want an easy way to perform and manage their AWS backups, but don’t need lots of enhanced features, AWS Backup is going to be an easy choice. Though the question of redundancy does remain: should you really store your data on AWS servers and backup in the same place? For true redundancy and security, you should use an entirely different set of servers located elsewhere.