How to Back Up to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Digital transformation is driving enterprises to adopt public cloud services from major providers such as Amazon Web Services, or AWS. As the cloud becomes more ubiquitous in an organization, IT can also begin to see an increase in the complexity of data management and protection.

Oftentimes, that complexity can arise in part because organizations don’t fully understand their responsibilities for management and protection of data in the cloud.

The Shared Responsibility Model: Who Does What in the Cloud

All public cloud providers, including AWS, publish a version of the Shared Responsibility model for security and compliance on their websites. Think of the model like this: While AWS is responsible for the protection and availability of the cloud, it’s still your responsibility to provide protection for your data in the cloud.

AWS ensures that its global infrastructure, hardware, and proprietary software are secure and available according to their predetermined recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) in the event of service outages or data loss.

Your organization, on the other hand, is responsible for securing all customer data; platforms; applications; identity & access management; configuration of operating systems, networks, and firewalls, etc. That includes cloud backup, recovery, and cloud archival. If AWS goes down, its RPOs and RTOs for restoring availability likely aren’t the same as your goals for launching a replacement EC2 instance, for example, or restoring access to a database stored in AWS S3. 

Simplifying Data Protection and Management in AWS

Even once an organization understands its responsibilities, data protection and management in the cloud remains a challenge. While AWS offers a variety of tools for AWS-specific backup and recovery, the tools can be somewhat limited in terms of capabilities and sometimes involve manual processes.

Hybrid and multicloud environments, increasingly common today, further complicate matters because the native AWS protection doesn’t extend to on-premises infrastructure or other cloud platforms.

In addition to protecting data, you need to be able to manage workloads and applications easily as well. Enabling application mobility across cloud platforms is critical to agile operations.

What organizations need today is a powerful solution that can help IT manage and protect data and applications across the entire ecosystem, from AWS to on-premises workloads.

Choose Rubrik for Comprehensive Cloud Capabilities

Rubrik has a range of solutions that simplify data protection and management for workloads running on AWS, including AWS EC2 instances, Relational Database Service (RDS), Oracle, SQL Server databases, file sets, EBS volumes, and more. Through the use of native REST API integrations, our solutions enable automated cloud archival; application recovery; cloud-native backup and recovery with native snapshots and API-based data protection; and backup data replication across AWS regions or between AWS and on-prem.  

Benefits include:

• Speedy data recovery. Eliminate the need for manual scripting, use predictive search to locate even a single file, and restore an EC2 instance with a few mouse clicks. 

• Policy-based automation. With a single SLA policy engine, you can quickly and conveniently create and manage EBS snapshots. 

• Easy, consolidated management. Manage on-prem and cloud applications and data through a single dashboard. You can also protect and monitor multiple AWS accounts from a single Rubrik cluster.
  

Learn more about how Rubrik can help you better manage and protect your data on AWS.