AI and analytics are driving competitive advantage across every industry. At the heart of this transformation are data lakehouses built on Apache Iceberg, now one of the fastest-growing standards for structured data on object storage such as Amazon S3. From retail and healthcare to finance and tech, Iceberg is powering the pipelines that fuel AI-driven insights.
But while adoption is surging, resilience has not kept pace. Native Iceberg tools weren’t built for long-term protection. They fall short when it comes to compliance, ransomware resilience, and rapid recovery. For businesses, that gap means more than data loss – it can result in regulatory fines, flawed AI models, and costly downtime that undermines innovation.
When Native Tools Fail: A Financial Firm’s Story
Consider a global financial services firm processing billions of trades every day. Every few minutes, trades are written into Iceberg tables. Regulations require this firm to keep a full history of transactions for seven-plus years.
With native Iceberg snapshots, this can quickly become unmanageable. Too many snapshots can create performance bottlenecks, and recovering to an event from just five months ago requires a slow, manual process. In finance, where downtime equals millions of dollars in losses, that’s simply unreasonable.
And the challenge isn’t limited to finance. Any industry running AI and analytics on Iceberg may face the same risks: limited retention, fragile recovery, and exposure to ransomware.
Why Generic S3 Backups Aren’t Enough
Some organizations turn to standard S3 backup tools as a workaround. While these can be air-gapped, they copy data files but don’t preserve the relationships that define an Iceberg table.
That means recovery isn’t a simple restore – it’s a complex, manual “rewiring” process to rebuild the entire table structure. For a financial firm with billions of trades, that translates into extended downtime, higher costs, and potential data loss.
Clumio can eliminate this problem by natively understanding Iceberg, enabling recovery that is fast, accurate, and transactionally consistent.
A Smart Path Forward: Clumio for Apache Iceberg
Commvault is closing this gap with the industry’s first and only solution to deliver Iceberg-aware, air-gapped cyber resilience: Clumio for Apache Iceberg on AWS.
Here’s what makes it different:
- Unlimited retention without performance hits – adhere to long-term compliance requirements without slowing down production environments.
- Air-gapped, immutable protection – designed to defend against ransomware, account compromise, and accidental deletions.
- Fast, Iceberg-aware recovery – ability to restore to any point in time or named snapshot with full table integrity.
- Cross-region and cross-account recovery – extend resilience across AWS environments for verifiable disaster recovery.
- Cost-efficient, incremental backups – enables capturing only changes to minimize costs while scaling with massive workloads.
Native Snapshots vs. Generic S3 Backups vs. Clumio for Apache Iceberg
| Capability | Native Iceberg Snapshots | Generic S3 Backups | Clumio for Apache Iceberg |
| Retention | Limited, may cause performance bottlenecks with excessive snapshots | Long-term possible, but only at file level | Unlimited, cost-effective, and built for compliance |
| Air-gapped protection | ✘ Lives in same AWS account (lost if table deleted) | ✓Can be air-gapped, but not Iceberg-aware | ✓Air-gapped, immutable vault for ransomware resilience |
| Recovery process | Manual, especially for older snapshots | Manual “rewiring” of table metadata and manifests | Fast, automated, Iceberg-aware recovery |
| Data integrity | Transactionally consistent, but governance and compliance liability | No understanding of Iceberg metadata; inconsistent restores | Transactionally consistent, full fidelity restores |
| Enterprise scale | Impractical for long-term retention; high storage costs | Brittle and error-prone at large scale | Proven at petabyte scale with billions of objects |
Why It Matters for Your Business
Clumio doesn’t just protect files – it can safeguard your AI and analytics investments so they can deliver results. This new capability helps enterprises:
- Accelerate AI innovation with confidence by protecting the data fueling critical pipelines.
- Avoid compliance penalties with unlimited, cost-effective snapshot retention.
- Recover in minutes, not days, thanks to Iceberg-aware automation that is designed to eliminate brittle, manual processes.
- Strengthen cyber resilience with actual air-gapped protection against ransomware and insider threats.
Building Resilience into the Future
As data lakehouses become the backbone of digital business, resilience shouldn’t be an afterthought. With Clumio for Apache Iceberg on AWS, enterprises finally have a solution that matches the scale, speed, and criticality of their AI and analytics workloads.
Because in the end, it’s not just about protecting data. It’s about protecting your business.
Interested in learning more? Request a demo, and sign-up for a free trial in AWS Marketplace today.
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