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Clumio Debuts Air-Gapped Backup and Recovery Solution for Amazon S3
Data protection company Clumio this week unveiled a new backup-as-a-service tool for Amazon S3 customers.
Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 differs from other backup and recovery solutions for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in that it uses air-gap protection to replicate S3 data. This can be particularly effective against security threats like ransomware, according to Chadd Kenney, Clumio's vice president of product. In fact, he calls it an "industry first."
"AWS provides versioning and replication, which is what most people have. But the downside is that it's not really protected against ransomware...because if a hacker gets access to the primary copy, in many cases, they can get access to that secondary copy, as well," Kenney said in an interview with AWSInsider. "What people are looking for is that air-gap protection, where it's outside of their security sphere."
An air-gapped backup and recovery model is one in which a copy of an organization's data is stored offline, in a different location than the original copy. Not having an air-gapped backup and recovery method in place, explained Kenney, is like "keeping all your money in your house. If your house burns down, you lose all your money, too."
Clumio's product also promises easier point-in-time data recovery, a capability that isn't readily available through existing Amazon S3 features, according to Suhas Nayak, head of product marketing at Clumio.
"Whether it's versioning or replication, there isn't a good way for you to recover the entire state of your bucket to an older point in time," he said. "Say you wanted to get a particular bucket to a state that it was on the 31st of December. There isn't a simple way to do that point-in-time recovery. You just have to go through every object version, one object at a time, across all those millions and billions of objects, and then figure out that bucket state on your own. So it's a very manual, complex, time-consuming process."
Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 provides multiple levels of protection for customers' data. Besides using an air-gapped protection model, it provides immutable storage with end-to-end encryption; multifactor authentication with single sign-on; and the ability for customers to bring their own AWS KMS key. There's also no delete button on Clumio's end -- which means attackers have no way to wipe out a customer's data.
Clumio already has backup and recovery solutions for other AWS services, including Relational Database Service, Elastic Block Store and EC2, as well as VMware Cloud on AWS. Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 will become generally available in December, with an early access program kicking off "at the end of October," Kenney said. More information is available here.