Self-service Disaster Recovery for AWS environments

0 Rono Jacob Amazon Web Services, AWS, Backup Policy, Disaster Recovery, SaaS

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) shared responsibility model outlines the differentiation of Security ‘of’ the cloud with AWS and Security ‘in’ the Cloud with the customer. Workloads that are migrated or created in AWS are not implicitly protected with Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities. 

“Systems, sites, and networks can fail no matter where they are located or who is managing them. Mission-critical service availability and protection of corporate data are essential no matter where services reside.” 

“Cloud services are not based on traditional enterprise architectures and management. IT departments no longer have end-to-end control of the environment.”

    – Gartner report on DR implementation

Enterprises need to be prepared for failures to their cloud infrastructure due to user errors, malicious & insider threat, operational mishaps or site outages. In this blog, we will explain how with Druva CloudRanger you can keep your AWS data safe and easily recoverable from any region-specific or account-specific outage.

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Legal Hold for AWS environments 

0 Rono Jacob Amazon Web Services, Backups, cloud management

With the exponential growth of data in recent years, we have seen that the necessity of data preservation is driving organizations to create new processes and procedures. At the same time, third-party vendors are developing new technologies that allow organizations to preserve data for eDiscovery, legal hold, governance and compliance purposes.

With legal hold, for example, you can preserve user backup data and avoid data deletion. Wikipedia describes this as:

“A legal hold is a process that an organization uses to preserve all forms of potentially relevant information when litigation is pending or reasonably anticipated.”  

In this process, Electronically Stored Information (ESI) to be collected and preserved can be broadly classified into:

  • Custodian data: email, personal storage on hardware devices or cloud accounts, social networking sites, tablets, smartphones
  • Non-Custodian data: databases, cloud storage, shared storage

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How to backup Amazon DynamoDB?

0 Steven Duff Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Web Services, Backups

Amazon DynamoDB is a popular NoSQL database often evaluated amongst others like MongoDB and Cassandra. It is fully managed and a serverless database service. It is amongst the top AWS services used by customers for a wide variety of use cases. 

According to AWS, more than 100,000 AWS customers have chosen DynamoDB as their key-value and document database for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and other applications that need low-latency data access at any scale. Create a new table for your application and let DynamoDB handle the rest.

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CloudRanger Achieves AWS Storage Competency Status

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, AWS, Backups, Disaster Recovery, Technology

CloudRanger is delighted to announce that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Competency status. This designation recognizes that CloudRanger provides proven technology to help customers successfully achieve their storage goals on AWS.

Achieving the AWS Storage Competency differentiates CloudRanger as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that possess deep domain expertise in one or more of the following core storage categories – Backup & Recovery, Primary Storage, Archive, or Business Continuance/Disaster Recovery (BCDR), having developed innovative technology and solutions that leverage AWS services. To receive the designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

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How to use file search to recover EBS snapshot data

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Backups, Snapshot Management

As most Amazon Web Services (AWS) users probably know, one of the most popular features offered on the platform is the ability to take point-in-time snapshots of data stored in Amazon Elastic Block Store. This method, more commonly referred to as an EBS snapshot, makes it easy and efficient to save incremental changes to your data at the block level, and eliminates the need to regularly engage in a full-blown backup of your files. And by ignoring unchanged data, EBS snapshots minimize the amount of time required to create a backup, which also helps save users money.

However, one traditional downside of backing up data with EBS snapshots is the difficulty of searching for and retrieving individual files, which can often be a cumbersome, time-consuming process. This proved to be a major problem for users, especially for those working for an enterprise-level business with vast amounts of data. But thanks to CloudRanger’s new file-level search functionality, retrieving backups of the specific files you need whenever you need them is as easy as using a search engine.

In the following article, we’ll explain how CloudRanger’s new file-level search functionality works. We’ll also explore the benefits of this exciting new tool, and explain how fits into a larger AWS backup/disaster recovery plan.

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