News
AWS Launches Managed Backup Service
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the availability of AWS Backup, which it describes as a "fully-managed, centralized backup service."
AWS Backup performs automated backup tasks across an organization's various assets stored in the AWS cloud, as well as on-premises. It provides a centralized environment, accessible through the AWS Management Console, for organizations to manage their overall backup strategies.
"With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create a policy that defines how frequently backups are created and how long they are stored. Customers can then assign these policies to their AWS resources, and AWS Backup automatically handles the rest by automatically scheduling backup actions for the assigned AWS resources, orchestrating across AWS services, and managing their retention period," AWS said in its announcement of the product.
AWS Backup eliminates the need for organizations to custom-create their own backup scripts for individual AWS services, the company contends. Bill Vass, head of Storage, Automation and Management Services at AWS, calls these organizations "tinkerers," and explicitly notes that AWS Backup is not for such users.
"We designed AWS Backup [the] type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services," Vass said in a prepared statement.
At launch, AWS Backup integrates with the following AWS services: Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon RDS and AWS Storage Gateway (which also enables backups of on-premises data, in addition to data in the cloud). Further integrations are coming, according to the company.
AWS also plans to add "cross-region functionality" to AWS Backup this year, according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, who provided a walk-through of the service in a blog post. Currently, backups are supported only "within the scope of a particular AWS Region," Barr said.
In other backup-related AWS news, the cloud giant this month acquired CloudEndure, a provider of cloud-based business continuity services headquartered in Israel. Terms of the deal were not officially disclosed, but reports estimate the acquisition to be worth around $200 million. CloudEndure offers various backup, disaster recovery and migration services for AWS, as well as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and VMware.