As your data grows and diversifies, storing, protecting, and recovering it becomes increasingly challenging. AWS offers the tools and resources to build scalable, durable, and secure backup & restore solutions to augment or replace your existing capabilities. Work with AWS and our ecosystem of storage partners to meet your Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), data retention, and compliance requirements — with pay-as-you-go pricing and no upfront capital investments. Whether your IT environment is on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-native, AWS can help you design and deploy a data-protection solution that meet your needs.

Understand all the considerations around designing and deploying an effective cloud backup solution by reading the Gartner report "Elastic Cloud Backup Engines Dictate the Success of Backup to the Cloud."

Go to this AWS Tech Talk to learn about AWS services, deployment best practices, and APN partners that can help extend your backup environments to the cloud.

Durability and Availability

AWS object, block, and file storage services are built for optimal durability and availability so that you can access your data anytime, anywhere. Data is distributed across physical facilities within an AWS Region and data can be automatically replicated to another AWS Region. Our global reach enables backup & restore where you operate for business and compliance purposes..

Flexibility and Scalability

AWS offers the most flexible storage management features so that storage administrators can classify, report, and visualize data usage trends to reduce costs and improve service levels. AWS customers also have access to virtually unlimited capacity to accommodate growing data volumes. Scale consumption as needs change without administrative overhead or hardware procurement cycles.

Cost Efficiencies

Our pricing options offer the flexibility to effectively manage your costs and still maintain the performance and capacity your business requires. With AWS, you can quickly and easily rightsize your services, leverage Reserved and Spot Instances, and use pricing management tools to monitor costs so that you can always be on top of how much you are spending.

Security

AWS data center and network architecture is designed for organizations that must meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements. For maximum data protection, AWS object storage services offer encryption features such as service-side encryption, AWS KMS (to manage your own encryption keys), and AWS Cloud HSM (to generate, store, and manage cryptographic keys).

Compliance

AWS manages many security assurance programs, which means segments of your compliance are already completed. We also offer governance-focused features to satisfy a range of privacy and audit requirements. This level of protection helps highly-regulated organizations operate more securely on AWS than on-premises.

Flexible Data Transfer

AWS supports the widest range of options to move data into (or out of) the cloud. Migrate data via networks and roads, use transfer services that best fit your requirements, and employ tracking services to gain visibility into the progress of your migrations. AWS also offers the largest ecosystem of partners so that you can work with the service provider of your choice.

Largest Partner Ecosysytem

Storage technology and consulting services from familiar solution providers already work with AWS. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes global Technology and Consulting Partners that specialize in storage-focused solutions and services for a vast range of workloads and use cases. Easily find, buy, deploy, and manage cloud-ready resources in a matter of minutes from AWS Marketplace.

More Backup & Restore Resources

AWS offers the most complete range of cloud storage services to support both virtually any Backup & Restore workload or application. To learn more about all of our storage services and access all documentation, visit Backup & Restore AWS Resources and start designing the optimal solution for your IT environment and organization needs.

Backup & Restore for All IT Environments

On-Premises

AWS can help protect data managed in your own data centers by backing it up to the cloud. All kinds of customers use the cloud to replace tape, streamline media management and simplify archival processes. Most major backup software vendors integrate direclty with AWS and preserve media catalogs and existing backup jobs. Or, choose the AWS Storage Gateway configuration that best suits your requirements – tape, volume, or file – and augment existing backup processes with Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier or Amazon EBS.

Hybrid

Some applications need data both on site and in the cloud at the same time. AWS Storage Gateway is ideal for organizations that want to work with data locally as well as in the cloud. For backups, this means integrating with existing systems and applications using standard storage protocols, while offering a virtually unlimited cloud back-end for big data analytics, archive, disaster or recovery.

Cloud-Native

AWS CodeDeploy automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications.

Customer Stories

To replace its tape backup system, King County worked with AWS to build a long-term archiving and storage solution.

Thomson Reuters uses Amazon Kinesis to stream data into Amazon S3 for permanent backup. Backups are replicated across AWS Regions for redundancy

Hess uses AWS to create snapshots of data volumes and stores them in S3 for nightly backups. The company also relies on Glacier for archiving.

Unilever stores data backups in Amazon S3. It also stores Amazon EBS snapshots in Amazon S3 in multiple Regions for data redundancy.

All of The Weather Company's data is stored in Amazon S3, leveraging the efficiency of cloud storage and the backup and replication capabilities.

Kempinski chose APN Premier Consulting Partner Cloudreach to migrate to AWS and enable cloud data management, monitoring, and backup.

Backup & Restore Capabilities on AWS

Tape Replacement

For many organizations, tape backup is critical for protecting data and applications but remains a fault-prone, resource-intensive, and costly process. To help companies build more resilient and high-performance backup capabilities, AWS offers data migration services, storage services, and partner solutions to improve and replace tape backups, on-premises tape libraries, and offsite physical archiving services. By working with AWS and our partners, organizations are leveraging the durability, scalability, cost efficiencies, flexibility, and automation features of AWS to protect their data while remaining agile in an ever-evolving marketplace.

Snapshot-Based Data Backup

Not only does Amazon EBS provide persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2, it also has backup capabilities. Amazon EBS customers can create snapshots (backups) of any EBS volume. These snapshots are then placed in Amazon S3 to be stored securely and redundantly in multiple Availability Zones. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time and costs required to store the snapshots. You can use EBS snapshots to back up large databases as well (often used for databases that are required to run 24/7).

Disaster Recovery

When designing backup strategies, organizations must identify the disaster situations that can occur, anticipate the potential impacts, and build comprehensive disaster recovery solutions. Doing so is one of the most important steps to ensuring business continuity during and after events that could negatively impact your operations, financial performance, and brand. To get ahead of disaster events, organizations are using AWS to enable faster disaster recovery of critical IT systems without incurring the infrastructure expense of a second physical site. We support many architectures such as pilot light, warm standby, and hot standby environments.

Database Backup

Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. In addition to being cost-efficient, flexible, and scalable, Amazon RDS automates the creation of storage volume snapshots of a database instance. The entire storage volume includes all files, so these snapshots are backing up the entire database instance (not just individual databases). This means you can quickly and easily recover your database to any point in time during the backup retention period.

Related Services

Object Storage

AWS object storage services Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier offer unmatched durability, availability, scalability, and security, which is why AWS stores data for millions of applications used by market leaders in every industry. These benefits also make AWS an ideal backup target. Amazon S3 offers the most flexible set of storage management and administration capabilities, which let you define lifecycle rules to automatically migrate less frequently accessed data to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, and archive data sets to Amazon Glacier. AWS object storage also supports versioning to preserve, retrieve and restore every version of every object you’ve ever stored in an Amazon S3 bucket; with versioning, you can easily recover from both intended user actions and application failures.

File Storage

Amazon EFS is a highly available, durable file storage service that also provides easy-to-deploy, file-system backup capabilities. Customers using Amazon EFS can automatically copy data from one Amazon EFS file system (the source file system) to another (the backup file system). They can also back up on-premises file systems directly to the AWS Cloud. Backup schedules can be defined and automatically deployed with services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda.

Data Transfer & Migration Services

Moving your data to and from AWS can be a costly, timely, and complex challenge, especially if you’re trying to minimize disruptions. This is why AWS offers a variety of tools and partner solutions to import and export data via the networks, roads, and technology partners that best fit your application and enterprise requirements. With AWS, moving data to the cloud for backup is even easier with our tracking services, which give you complete visibility into the progress of your data migrations, such as the AWS Migration Hub and the AWS Database Migration Service.

Archiving and Cold Storage

Whether to satisfy internal governance purposes or regulatory compliance requirements, organizations must retain data for extended durations which traditionally requires expensive, purpose-built hardware and can quickly drive up storage costs as data volumes grow. AWS offers the storage services you need to build long-term archiving capabilities to store and backup data cost-effectively for years or even decades. AWS lifecycle policies can be automated, which makes transitioning data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier simple. Additionally, Amazon Glacier Vault Lock provides write-once-read-many (WORM) storage to meet compliance requirements for records retention.

Backup & Restore Partners

The AWS Storage Competency consists of industry-leading consulting and technology partners that provide proven technology and implementation capabilities for a variety of use cases, including backup, restore, and recovery operations to, from, and within the AWS environment. Learn more about these APN storage competency partners and APN backup & recovery solutions.