Data protection along with security used to be an afterthought in many in-house IT projects. In the cloud, data protection has became the forefront for many IT implementations. Business users spinning up servers or EC2 instances in AWS clamor for the best protection for their servers and data.

Luckily, AWS provides a highly effective snapshot mechanism on EBS volumes that are stored on a highly durable S3 storage. Snapshots are storage efficient and use copy-on-write and restore-before-read which allow for both consistency and immediate recovery. Storing snapshot in S3 which is a separate infrastructure from EBS, has the added benefit of data resiliency – failure in the production data will not affect the snapshot data.

However, this backup and restore mechanism provided by AWS lacks many of the features found in the traditional backup solutions such as cataloging, ease of management, automation, and replication. In response, third party vendors are now offering products and services that will make backup and recovery easy and efficient in AWS. Some vendors provide services to manage and automate this. Other vendors provide products that mimics the ease of management of the traditional backup. For instance, Dell EMC provides Avamar and Data Domain virtual editions that you can use on AWS.