Amazon Web Services launches AWS Backup

Amazon Web Services has introduced AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup makes protecting storage volumes, databases, and file systems easier by giving customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place.

As enterprises move more and more applications to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, including databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems. While these services in AWS provide backup capabilities, customers often create custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements. AWS Backup removes the need for custom solutions or manual processes by providing a centralized place to manage backups across AWS. 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.

“As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster,” said Bill Vass, VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS. “We designed AWS Backup for this second 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. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."

Initially, AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway, with support for additional services planned for the future. Customers can also back up on-premises application data through the AWS Backup integration with AWS Storage Gateway, providing a common way to protect their on-premises data in the AWS cloud.