The importance of backing up your organization’s lifeblood, its data, is often the first piece of advice any IT professional will hand out. Often for free. And that is often where the advice often ends, “backups are important.” They are but such statements ignore why they are important and how to make sure data is secured.
For those who have joined the serverless revolution backing up data on Amazon’s AWS platform is equally important, this article will cover both the why and how.
AWS Security Challenges
When Amazon developed and released AWS to the public, one of its founding principles was a shared security methodology. Meaning, Amazon would look to secure the infrastructure while users were responsible for the rest, including their data stored on the cloud platform, and the operating systems used alongside AWS. This shared responsibility seemed to have missed the mark with users as one study showed that the majority of security issues related to negligence on the part of customers rather than the infrastructure.
The issues often show why backing up data is so critical as human error and not following best security practices leave an organization open to disaster. Examples of errors or not following best security practices are granting privileged access to S3 buckets for those that do not require it. The granting of privileged access, in general, is an issue across platforms and networks.
Regarding AWS in particular, the lack of visibility regarding visualizing logs also prevents some from even knowing there is an issue. This in general makes backing up data across AWS services even more important so that disaster is not made worse by human error.
How to backup
One of the most popular choices to backup AWS data is to use Amazon’s own AWS Backup service. One of the reasons for its popularity is the ability to backup data both in the cloud and on-premise. Also, the ease of use is another contributing factor to the popularity. For users to adopt the service they need to simply define a backup policy on the service. The policy can be seen as a plan that instructs AWS Backup when to make backups, and what needs to be backed up securely.
Users can select various timeframes for backups placing them in greater control of the process. Further, the console shows the user what resources are selected to be backed up and allows for data to be restored from a specific backup date.
There are also several great s3 backup third-party solutions. These offer an enterprise-grade backup solution for AWS S3 buckets. These often deliver native integration with a wealth of options to better suit the needs of the organization and its backup policy. Further, they can be used on both private and public cloud resources to make sure disaster recovery is made as easy as possible. For users, using both third-party tools and Amazon’s own AWS Backup can create a hybrid solution to current and future backup needs.
Backups are done as insurance against disaster, be it a cybersecurity incident, natural disaster, or human error. Over the lifetime of an organization, such disasters are almost certain. Luckily, through both third-party developers and the cloud platform itself, several options have been made available so that if disaster strikes the organization is not permanently crippled.