Emphasizing AWS Best Practices in Backup Strategies
Just like with on-premises environments, your cloud-hosted data can fall victim to any number of data loss or outage scenarios, with cyberthreats like ransomware continuing to top the list. Ransomware attacks are increasing at an alarming rate, with backup repositories becoming the primary target. Our 2022 Ransomware Trends Report reveals that an astounding 94% of attacks targeted these repositories. This alarming situation emphasizes the need to ensure your backup environment is fully secured, enabling you to quickly and cleanly recover every time. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers backup guidance through their Shared Responsibility Model and Well-Architected Framework, comprehending and implementing effective AWS backup practices can be challenging. That’s why we created the “10 Best Practices for AWS Backup” e-book. This comprehensive guide outlines your responsibilities and equips you with successful strategies for protecting and securing your data.
The following points are just a few of the essential topics discussed in our e-book, providing you with a glimpse of the valuable information you’ll gain:
- Defining service level objectives: As you devise your backup strategy, establish your organization’s recovery objectives. Your recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) will directly influence how you backup and store data, and represents solutions that cater to your specific needs:
- RPO: Determines how often to backup data. Consider the amount of data loss your business can sustain without disrupting continuity.
- RTO: Defines the acceptable downtime before it becomes problematic. Assess how quickly you need to recover your data.
- Data storage and tiering: AWS offers various storage solutions for data protection, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and varying tiers of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Selecting the appropriate storage location for your backup data is crucial to ensure a fast response and recovery, while also optimizing for cost-effective retention.
- Securing your environment: We also cover how to secure your backup environment using AWS features like immutability and encryption through Amazon S3 Object Lock and AWS KMS respectively. Keeping backup data logically separated from production across accounts minimizes the risk of an attack compromising all your data, ensuring that your backups remain secure, safe and accessible when needed.
- Compliance and regulation: A well-designed backup environment aids in maintaining compliance and meeting regulatory requirements. Managing compliance can be challenging and time-consuming, but by establishing a lifecycle-management process for your data and its locality by utilizing automation, you can efficiently manage your environment, adhere to regulatory compliance and proactively address issues.
- Minimizing human error: Automating your backup processes with third-party tools reduces the risk of human errors and guarantees consistent and efficient backups. Regularly testing your backup and recovery processes not only ensures their effectiveness and integrity, but also builds muscle memory for when a real-world situation occurs.
- Cost optimization strategies: Effective cost management is crucial when using cloud services. By implementing automated tiering, data retention and data reduction practices, you can optimize spending and eliminate unnecessary costs without compromising protection.
Don’t let your organization become another ransomware victim. By leveraging the features of AWS and third-party management tools like Veeam, you can create a robust and secure cloud environment to safeguard your data. Our “10 Best Practices for AWS Backup” e-book is an indispensable resource to help you design and establish a reliable, secure and cost-effective backup strategy. Remember, the stakes are high, and the consequences of inadequate backup protection can be devastating. Download our e-book now and take the first step towards securing your data, ensuring business continuity and staying ahead of ransomware threats.
