Protecting Your Amazon S3 Data with Clumio: A Comprehensive Solution

Key Challenges of Protecting Data in Amazon S3

Protecting Amazon S3 data comes with several challenges:

• Heterogeneous Data: A single S3 bucket can hold a variety of data types, across various vectors such as tags, prefixes, and regions. This heterogeneity makes it challenging to identify what to protect and apply backup or recovery policies based on each vector.
• Scale Limitations: S3 environments can span petabytes of data and billions of objects, consisting of both large files and a vast number of small files. These environments require backup systems that can scale without performance degradation or escalating costs.
• Performance Limitations: Initial backups can be time-intensive and are often bottlenecked by S3 API limits or other throughput limitations.
• Limited Fault Tolerance: Native capabilities like versioning or replication don’t protect against accidental deletions and malicious changes. Neither versioning nor replication has a “sense of time,” making it impossible to go back to a specific point in time in case of an operational disruption. Additionally, since replication is “blind,” enabling it would mean malicious changes get replicated, leading to an undesirable state in your secondary copy as well.
• Lack of Airgap Protection: The native backup capability stores the backups in the same enterprise security sphere as the primary copy of data, leaving it vulnerable to account compromises and ransomware attacks. For this reason, data estates often require external, immutable, and isolated backup strategies.
• High Change Rates: Buckets with frequent object updates, additions, and deletions demand low-RPO protection strategies to avoid data loss between backups.
• Data Management: Tracking, protecting, and restoring objects is difficult at scale, particularly across regions and storage classes.
• Restore Performance (RTO): Fast, granular recovery is critical but difficult to achieve with traditional tools, especially when restoring massive object sets.

Clumio’s Solution: Cloud-Native, Scalable Data Protection

Clumio is a cloud-native cyber resilience solution built on AWS, designed for rapid backup and recovery of Amazon S3 data. It allows quick rollbacks to specific versions of S3 buckets. Clumio’s backups are immutable and air-gapped, providing extra protection against data loss. By leveraging serverless scaling and parallel rehydration, Clumio can provide critical access to billions of objects in minutes, not days.

Clumio’s lightweight architecture, powered by serverless AWS Lambda functions, processes events, fetches objects, applies data reduction techniques, and stores data in an immutable backup repository. Metadata, inventory, and backup data are encrypted and stored in Clumio’s isolated AWS account. The event-driven and parallelized design captures changes to buckets on an ongoing basis without disrupting your production workloads.

Key Features That Differentiate Clumio S3 Protection

Scale

Clumio allows customers to scale far beyond traditional Amazon S3 backup limits. In production environments, Clumio has protected over 80 billion objects and 30 petabytes of data from a single S3 bucket – more than 10x the scale typically supported by AWS Backup (~7.5 billion objects/6 PB)¹. The platform is continuously improving to handle larger environments, so customers can confidently expand protection as their data grows. This allows you to protect more critical data, retain more restore points, and reduce risk across your environment.

Backup Performance

Initial backups of billion object, petabyte scale buckets can often take weeks with traditional backup solutions. Subsequent backups of large buckets, too, require superior performance in order to complete the backups within the given RPO.

Clumio can significantly scale backup capacity very quickly with its serverless architecture. It all works under the covers using AWS technology to automatically scale up and down as needed for an organization’s specific data backup needs. Powered by this serverless architecture, Clumio offers near continuous backups with RPO as low as 15 minutes, regardless of the object and capacity scale of your S3 buckets.

Restore Performance and RTO

Clumio offers industry-leading RTOs with its Instant Access feature, which uses Amazon S3 Object Lambda Access Points for read-only backup access. This allows for rapid access to your S3 objects without having to kick off any full restores. The result of this unique feature is that RTO can be reduced to mere minutes, and DR testing becomes a breeze. Crucial data can be accessed rapidly for emergency access in critical situations. This is particularly useful in scenarios such as compliance audits where recovery needs to be proven and a full restore can be cost (and time) prohibitive.

Protection Groups

Clumio allows fine-grained control of data with protection groups. These are logical filters to define what data to back up based on factors like criticality and business requirements. Once protected, the objects in an S3 bucket can be restored at an individual or bulk level, or you can choose to restore whole buckets or prefixes, to any given point in time.

And for slices of your buckets that don’t need to be backed up, Clumio Backtrack offers a versioning-based point in time recovery feature that can restore your buckets to any given point in time using just object metadata information.

Immutable, Air-Gapped Protection

Clumio achieves superior data protection with air-gapped copies of customer data. The data is stored in a separate Clumio-maintained AWS account that is secured via role-based access control. Backup data is stored in an immutable vault outside of the enterprise security sphere, using composite keys to encrypt data in-flight and at-rest. If your primary or secondary data locations are compromised, Clumio has an air-gapped protected copy of your critical data ready to be restored and accessed.

TCO Savings

Clumio has purpose built a highly optimized storage layer to store your backups under the hood. Organizations save 30% or more on backup costs using Clumio vs. traditional AWS backup methods. Not only can organizations leverage the faster backup and restore capabilities of Clumio, but it comes at a lower cost as well!

Serverless Architecture

Clumio is built on a serverless architecture that’s both scalable and performant. The architecture provides the ability to scale up and down based on the backup needs. This architecture, built with AWS Lambda, is perfectly suitable for protecting S3 that’s inherently built for huge scale. Clumio’s S3 offering meticulously tracks, protects, and restores objects with RPO as low as 15 minutes and or very fast RTO expectations, even at a billion object/petabyte scale.

Conclusion

Amazon S3’s unmatched scalability and flexibility make it the foundation of modern cloud storage – but protecting data at that scale presents serious challenges. From environments spanning petabytes and billions of objects to the need for air-gapped protection and rapid recovery, neither traditional backup tools nor native capabilities can keep up. Clumio closes this gap with a cloud-native, serverless architecture purpose-built to meet the speed, scale, and security needs of today’s enterprises.

Interested in learning more about how to keep your S3 data secure, recoverable, and available for innovation? Schedule a demo and experience simple, logically air-gapped, and default-immutable backups for AWS workloads. You can also get a 14-day free trial of Clumio in the AWS Marketplace.

1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/s3-backups.html#s3-completion-windows