Insights

The digital infrastructure sector faces challenges in achieving a measurable reduction in outage rates. Significant financial losses, human losses, compliance breaches, and reputational damage are some of the biggest problems because of the severe outage. According to the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority, Uptime Institute’s 2022 outage analysis report, downtime costs, and consequences are worsening. It also says that 80% of data center managers are experiencing the outage issue. This data is enough to understand why organizations especially small businesses, need cloud backup solutions. Amazon’s AWS Backup is the first choice to select as a cloud storage service provider among different business industries. The biggest reason behind this is a centralized backup service that supports other online AWS storage and backup services.

Read the full article to learn more about why you need to implement a cloud backup service, what makes AWS Backup best cloud backup solution, and how can you implement it?

Understand Cloud Backup and Why do you need it?

Cloud backup creates a copy of the required data on the virtual platform, which means data replication. Cloud backup and restore is a cloud-based service that makes backup copies of the data and restores or recovers the lost data from the backup copies. This service is also one of the common cloud-based disaster recovery strategies to offer data recovery. This service provides data backups in the virtual environment with one main objective – to protect data and resources.

Reasons to adopt the cloud backup

Disaster can happen at any time and at anywhere. Whether running a small business or a large pool of services, you might face database corruption, accidental data loss, or other similar problems that directly impact IT assets.

The big organizations have their recovery plans enabled with cloud technologies but still face outage issues. However, they recover their losses after some time. But small businesses don’t invest much in designing data restorage and recovery plans. This ignorance leads them to data losses and financial and human losses.

Read the below 3 precise reasons to learn their importance

• IT asset security and prevention: What happens when unplanned power cuts, disasters like earthquakes, or similar scenarios happen? It impacts the entire infrastructure, including data, servers, data centers, and other linked resources. It automatically allows malicious users to hack critical data or stop the business process execution for some minutes to longer days. Data security and privacy are your responsibility. Ensuring the security of whole IT assets is your major critical business operation. That’s why you need solutions and a plan to ensure their security.
• Infrastructure breakage: Whether it’s a small hardware device, a huge network, or a software upgrade, any failures result in downtime. If hardware gets failed, how would you continue your business operations? How would you communicate with any stakeholders if your communication is not working? You need a solution that always has a backup solution to recover from any failure. Cloud backup solutions allow you to prevent your businesses from the negative impacts of these infrastructure breakages.

Let’s understand it with a real example. A single user was updating their settings which triggered an error, and result – Twitter faced their most prolonged global outage of around 45 minutes.

• Natural disasters: Even after predicting the occurrence of natural disasters, you can not ensure 100% security of your infrastructure. Let’s take the recent case of big giant IT companies, Google and Oracle, whose data centers suffered a breakdown because of the strongest summer heatwave. Both companies reported the failures of their data center’s cooling systems. It teaches that disaster doesn’t see the size of a company, it can impact anyone.

These reasons would help you to understand why you need cloud backup solutions to backup, restore, or recover any data at any time from anywhere.

What makes AWS Backup the best cloud backup solution?

AWS Backup is a centralized backup service that offers fully managed backup services to automate the data backup across AWS services in the cloud and on-premise using AWS Storage Gateway. The following points discuss how you can leverage AWS backup for your cloud backup solutions:

• You can centrally configure your backup policies and monitor all activities for other AWS resources like Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon DynomoDB tables, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon EFS file systems, and AWS Storage Gateway.
• You don’t need to create custom scripts or any other manual process using this service. You can quickly consolidate backup tasks.
• This policy-based backup solution simplifies your cloud backup management and fulfills mandatory backup compliance requirements.
• You can utilize its “vault lock” feature to prevent activities like manually deleting backups and changes in the backup lifecycles and meet compliance requirements. This feature follows the concept of the Write-Once-Read-Many model.
• You can do a quick audit and generate a report on the compliance of data protection policies using an audit manager.

Simple working of AWS backup

Look at the following image, which shows how AWS backup works. Its’ working model is simple. You must create a backup plan with appropriate configurations and assign applications and service resources. You must define parameters like backup frequency and backup retention period. After allocating all resources to the policies, this service automatically creates the backups and stores in the designed encrypted backup vault. This will automatically start protecting your resources. After that, you can regularly monitor, configure, restore, and audit the backup plan.

Image: AWS Backup working model

The unique features of the AWS cloud services make it popular. They are as follows:

• Highly scalable
• Lower costs
• Durability
• Compatibility
• Quality performance

You don’t have to worry about your existing IT infrastructure. These services support on-premise architecture, cloud-native architecture, and hybrid architecture.

What do you need to use AWS Backup service?

You need to follow 3 simple steps to use the AWS Backup service. Check out those steps as follows:

1. Signup for AWS: Signing up is mandatory to use any cloud services. You have to sign up on the AWS platform, which automatically creates your AWS account and allows you to access all AWS services according to need. It is good to prepare your budget and cross-check AWS Backup pricing here.
2.  Create an IAM user: Signing up for an AWS account creates “an AWS account root user” who has the right to access all AWS services and resources. But, you must create “an IAM user” to access AWS Backup. Give a grant to this user for full access and share admin user credentials to interact with AWS and execute tasks like creating buckets, users, and more. Check the following image to know two options for creating an administrator user.
   

   Image: Types of an administrative user

   Image credit: Amazon AWS

3. Create an IAM role: The last step is to create IAM role through IAM console. The role will grant you AWS Backup permissions to access supported resources, create policies, and attach them to role.

Sign in to AWS Management Console and open IAM Console In the IAM console, Choose Roles in the navigation pane, and choose to Create Role Choose AWS Services Roles, where you will get the option, AWS Backup. Choose Next: Permissions On the Attach permission policies, check options “AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForBackup”,  and “AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForRestores.” Choose Next: Tags Choose Next: Review Enter a unique name for the Role name Choose Create Role Choose the role on the Roles page

You have to take the following points:

• How to create an AWS account and configure AWS services
• You must have at least one resource supported by AWS Backup
• Get some information about the AWS services and resources

The AWS backup console provides various options such as on-demand, schedule, and configuration to back up resources. Have a look at the below image.

Image: Backup options on AWS Backup Console

How Wise achieved benefits after implementing AWS Backup

A famous company in financial services, Wise, formerly TransferWise offers money transaction services. The USP of the company is to provide inexpensive services across the globe. More than 10 million use WISE for their financial services. Before executing AWS Backup, the company used AWS Storage Gateway for their data backup environment to AWS, along with database migration to Amazon RDS. But the company was looking for a solution that brings database backups to AWS and protects it from threats. Then, the company adopted AWS Backup, which simplified the backup and supported AWS Storage Gateway and other services in AWS. The company tagged and templatized its policies and accomplished its backup goals efficiently. Now they get the following benefits:

• Easy and efficient compliance for auditors to assess
• Closed recovery data center
• Easy scaling to meet global requirements
• Automation at scale for recovery & compliance

Closing Thought

A slight data loss can interrupt your business operations and impact your small business. Your losses would not be limited to the data, it would affect your client’s relationship. And you don’t want to lose your customers. The best way to prevent the problem of any data loss is to adopt cloud backup solutions for data replication, restoration, and recovery. To implement this cloud backup solution, take the help of Amazon’s AWS Backup services. Understand your backup requirements, and execute the service to backup and protect your data from any loss.