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Clumio brings backup-as-a-service to Amazon S3

Clumio
Clumio

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With cloud spending going through the roof, the global “backup-as-a-service” market is booming. Pegged at $8.4 billion last year, the data backup and recovery segment is projected to nearly double within six years as businesses continue to embrace cloud computing and all things SaaS.

Indeed, the growing scourge of ransomware, along with high-profile events such as the OVH datacenter fire, highlight the importance of having a robust disaster recovery plan in place. And data backup and recovery play a crucial role here.

Against this backdrop, Clumio today announced what it’s touting as the industry’s first comprehensive backup-as-a-service solution specifically for Amazon S3, an object (file or associated metadata) storage service that lets Amazon’s AWS cloud customers store data from anywhere.

In the cloud

Founded out of Santa Clara, California in 2017, Clumio has raised some $186 million in funding for its AWS-focused data backup and recovery service. So far, Clumio has covered native AWS services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Relational Database Service (RDS), as well as VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS and Microsoft 365 workloads. In the coming weeks, the Clumio Protect platform will also provide backup and recovery for S3, with copies stored outside the customers’ AWS account.

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“Clumio is built from the cloud up to support enterprises’ most critical workloads, and S3 is the largest, most durable data store in AWS, with some of the most critical data,” Clumio product VP Chadd Kenney told VentureBeat.

It’s worth noting that AWS has its own built-in backup smarts, including versioning (keeping multiple versions of an object in the same bucket), replication (copying objects across S3 buckets), and object locking (storing objects using a write-once-read-many model), that help counter accidental data deletion or over-writes. However, these don’t allow companies to restore S3 objects or an entire bucket to a specific point in time.

“You can only revert an object to one of the last versions — whenever it was created — versus rolling it back to a specific date,” Kenney explained. “You cannot see the entire bucket or a series of buckets across accounts, at a specific point in time.”

Clumio Protect for S3, on the other hand, promises companies additional built-in “efficiencies” and, importantly, point-in-time data recovery. But why might a company wish to go back to a specific date in time — surely they’d only ever need the most recent data version in the event of a disaster? According to Kenney, a company might need access to the content of a bucket going several months back as part of their auditing and compliance commitments.

“Versioning and replication do not provide a mechanism to get this past state of an S3 bucket,” he said. “With Clumio, you can get that state with a click of a button for any S3 bucket protected with Clumio. Such point-in-time recovery is an important use case that is requested by customers to meet compliance requirements, as well as to recover from account compromises such as, say, from ransomware.”

Get backup

Most platforms operate what is known as a “shared responsibility” model, whereby the platform owner provides infrastructure-level disaster recovery and security and the customer retains responsibility for the security and management of individual accounts on their own instance of a SaaS app (e.g. Microsoft 365 or Salesforce).

As such, there has been significant activity in the backup-and-recovery space of late, underscoring the role third-party services play in protecting cloud data. Veeam, for example, was snapped up last year by Insight Partners in a $5 billion deal, while Druva recently secured $147 million at a valuation exceeding $2 billion. Elsewhere, SaaS data backup and recovery platform Rewind raised $65 million earlier this month, shortly after OwnBackup drew in $240 million at a $3.35 billion valuation.

Companies could, of course, develop their own backup solutions for services such as S3, but the resource-intensive process is simply out of reach for many.

“After hundreds of customer conversations, what quickly emerged was that the complexity and inefficiency of trying to build your own backup solution for S3 is too painful for any enterprise,” Kenney said. “S3 is massive and requires a cloud-native data protection solution that is built from the cloud up to deliver all the scale and efficiencies that existing data protection products cannot provide at a reasonable cost.”

Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 will be available under an early access program in late October and is expected to be generally available by the end of the year.

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