Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Backup

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced AWS Backup, a fully-managed centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup makes protecting storage volumes, databases, and file systems easier by giving customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place.

As enterprises move more and more applications to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, including databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems. While these services in AWS provide backup capabilities, customers often create custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements. AWS Backup removes the need for custom solutions or manual processes by providing a centralized place to manage backups across AWS. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create a policy that defines how frequently backups are created and how long they are stored. Customers can then assign these policies to their AWS resources, and AWS Backup automatically handles the rest by automatically scheduling backup actions for the assigned AWS resources, orchestrating across AWS services, and managing their retention period.

“As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct 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,” said Bill Vass, VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS. “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. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."

Initially, AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway, with support for additional services planned for the future. Customers can also back up on-premises application data through the AWS Backup integration with AWS Storage Gateway, providing a common way to protect their on-premises data in the AWS cloud.

State Street Corporation is the world's leading provider of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research, and trading. “We operate in the financial services industry and must provide data storage solutions that ensure the integrity and availability of backup data as stipulated by the FFIEC IT examination handbook,” says Nauman Noor, Managing Director, State Street Corporation. “Meeting these regulations requires us to develop and maintain an internal serverless application to enable timely and auditable backups across the AWS services we use. With AWS Backup’s centralized backup console, we will have a single pane of glass to audit our backup processes across our AWS environment, mitigating the need for custom applications and thus, easing our effort to aid data integrity and availability. The ability to set backup policies for automated backup scheduling and backup retention provides us flexibility to address the needs for varying levels of criticality in a cost effective and consistent manner.”

Smile Brands is a leading dental support organization that provides business support services to over 400 locations across 17 states. “We manage thousands of AWS resources, such as storage volumes and databases, and all of them must meet compliance according to HIPAA backup requirements,” says George Suda, Senior VP and Chief Information Officer, Smile Brands. “Ensuring that all our AWS workloads are properly backed up can require manual processes and custom scripts. With AWS Backup’s centralized backup console, we will be able to define a backup policy that meets our compliance requirements and apply the same policy to all our AWS resources across the various AWS services that we use. AWS Backup will automatically handle the backup processes on our behalf, providing a full-managed and cost-effective solution that removes the need for manual processes or custom scripts.”

Rackspace delivers modern IT as a service, helping customers in more than 150 countries drive business results with technology. “Rackspace is focused on delivering next generation cloud services to help our customers meet their data protection and regulatory compliance needs,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Managed Public Clouds at Rackspace. “With AWS Backup, we now have access to a cloud-scale, centralized backup solution to help automate, manage, and monitor data protection for customers. We believe AWS Backup will also provide customers greater operational efficiency, allowing us to simplify the process for supporting our customers’ auditing and compliance requirements.”