Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 provides point-in-time recovery and anti-ransomware features to a storage environment that is increasingly becoming mission-critical.
Amazon S3 has gone from being a receptacle for secondary data to a vault for business-critical data, and Clumio has a new way to protect this storage environment.
This week, the backup-as-a-service vendor introduced Clumio Protect for Amazon S3, which provides point-in-time recovery and other data protection features not available natively in the object storage service. This includes ransomware protection features such as immutable storage, multifactor authentication, a separate storage environment for S3 backups and access controls.
The Clumio Protect platform also gives customers a centralized view of every AWS bucket, account and region under management, which can allow storage admins to quickly spot problems with backup processes and perform audits.
Clumio expects S3 protection to enter early access in late October, with general availability sometime in December.
Amazon S3 stores data in three or more availability zones and natively offers versioning and replication as data protection features, but these backup services aren't enough for enterprises, said Chadd Kenney, vice president of product at Clumio. The features lead to higher storage costs because they duplicate data and are executed at the bucket level, which means they don't allow granular, single-file recovery.
More importantly, the S3 versioning and replication features do not protect against ransomware, which is a top concern for enterprises right now, Kenney added. Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 has security features such as immutability and encryption that make it harder for cybercriminals to modify or delete the backups.
Amazon S3 was a dumping ground for data. But a lot of modern apps are pushing data into S3, so now it's a mix of useless and critical data.
Chadd KenneyVice president of product, Clumio
"Versioning is a first line of defense, followed by replication, but it's not a ransomware solution," Kenney said.
Amazon S3 was mostly used as a repository for static images or backup copies generated by data protection software, but it has also become a common storage option for data generated by cloud-native applications, Kenney said. Some of those applications and data are critical for businesses, and Clumio customers have said backing up Amazon S3 is a challenge.
"Amazon S3 was a dumping ground for data," Kenney said. "But a lot of modern apps are pushing data into S3, so now it's a mix of useless and critical data."
Sorting through the S3 swamp
Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 brings important ransomware protection to an environment that has become critical for some enterprises, said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. S3 is commonly home to secondary data such as backups, but for organizations running production in AWS, S3 is their primary storage.
"If your S3 data is important to you, this helps you manage and protect it," Bertrand said.
Customers could achieve the granular restores and global search that Clumio now provides for S3, but it would take stitching together S3's native data protection mechanisms and third-party backup software, Bertrand added. Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 reduces that headache and does everything in-cloud, which can be an incentive for some customers.
Outside of its data protection capabilities, Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 addresses a growing data management problem in public cloud repositories, Bertrand said. Global visibility and search let customers identify what data is and isn't critical, solving compliance issues and saving on costs by backing up only what's needed.
Recovery from cyber attacks and overall optimization of storage and backup processes are characteristics enterprises look for, Bertrand said.
"Clumio is really fitting the bill on cyber resiliency," he said. "It shows a maturing of its offering."
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.
Johnny Yu covers enterprise data protection news for TechTarget's Storage sites SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery. Before joining TechTarget in June 2018, he wrote for USA Today's consumer product review site Reviewed.com.
