Clumio anticipates a significant market for this solution when it hits GA in December, because AWS S3 has become a large customer pain point, and theirs is the first solution on the market for it.
Chadd Kenney, VP of Product at Clumio
Today, data protection vendor Clumio is announcing the availability of the industry’s first Amazon S3 backup as a service, Clumio Protect for Amazon S3. It becomes the first solution on the market specifically designed to back up AWS S3 object storage.
Clumio is built on the AWS platform, and so has a deep focus on it, but until now S3 has been too problematic for them or anyone else to take a stab at solving.
“We went out and did 250 customer conversations, and most of these – 180 – said S3 is a big pain to back up,” said Chadd Kenney, VP of Product at Clumio. “We started on this mission to tackle the biggest problem in AWS. It’s the kind of solution that separates the cloud-native from the cloud wannabe, because it tests the ability to scale compute and storage separately. The problem has been so big that no one has tackled it before now. This gives us our opportunity to showcase what we have built for the largest service inside AWS.”
Kenney said that while S3 has now been around for 15 years, not having a backup solution specifically for it wasn’t as big a problem in the past, because of how it was used, and the type of threats it faced.
“S3 used to be used as a dumping ground of data,” he noted. “Now, more microservices and data lakes are being used in S3. Today, most people use S3 as their main repository. Versioning is required, and needs to be done at the bucket level, so you wind up backing up everything. Replication also forces one-to-one mapping of accounts and buckets. And small files, even 1k in size, will cost a minimum of 128k to back up in S3.
Kenney also noted that S3 has no ransomware protection – at a time when ransomware is on the rise – no compliance visibility, no global search, and is unoptimized, with high costs.
Clumio’s response, Kenney said, was to achieve four specific goals.
“We wanted to provide the ultimate ransomware protection possible, to provide air-gapped point-in-time protection,” he said. “We wanted to provide very granular compliance visibility, so you can see all accounts in one view. We wanted a very low RTO, with restore times reduced from hours to minutes. We also wanted much more cost efficiency in S3 by reducing the need for versioning, and eliminating small file costs.”
The ransomware protection comes from Clumio Protect’s air-gapped S3 backups being stored outside the customers’ AWS account in immutable storage with data-at-rest and in-flight encryption with the ability to bring your own keys.
“We have created an abstraction layer with multiple buckets across all accounts and provide data classification to define exactly what to protect, instead of protecting everything,” Kenney said. “The customer defines the buckets and the prefixes they want to protect, or not protect, as well as what versions to protect, and the storage class to protect. AWS S3 object versioning, on the other hand, are buckets only, can only restore change to objects, and can only recover objects.” Clumio also provides multi-factor authentication with SSO integration, access controls for assets and roles, and the absence of a delete button to prevent hackers from deleting customer data.
This centralized view across buckets, accounts, and regions Clumio Protect provides also provides that granular compliance visibility that Clumio wanted. Customers also get real-time visibility and alerts when backups are out of compliance.
The low RTO objectives are enabled by Clumio Protect’s flexible recovery options for buckets, prefixes, and objects across any AWS account, reducing restore times from hours or days to minutes.
“It really reduces restore time dramatically,” Kenney said. Global search also enables quick access to any file, at any point-in-time, anytime it is needed.
Finally, Kenney said that Clumio’s built-in efficiencies remove the need for versioning, reduces the overhead of small files, and enables data classification of critical datasets.
“The small file size optimization itself reduces both storage and management costs by about 10x, and the whole of Protect provides about a 50% cost reduction compared to customers building it themselves in AWS,” he indicated.
The early access program is slated for the end of October, with Clumio giving away an iPad to every customer who joins. General availability is anticipated for the AWS Re:Invent event in December.
