Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Data protection and governance on AWS (STG207)

Summary

• Speakers: Palak, Marcos Perez (AWS Senior Solutions Architect), and Matthews (Customer representative from Asurion).
• Data Growth: Data has grown from half a zettabyte since the dawn of humanity to 2003, to an estimated 33 zettabytes in 2018, and is expected to reach 181 zettabytes by 2025.
• Data Protection: Refers to safeguarding critical data from loss, compromise, and corruption, and ensuring business continuity.
• Challenges: Customers face challenges in managing data protection policies across various services, leading to siloed solutions and compliance issues.
• AWS Backup: A solution developed to address hybrid and cloud-native use cases, simplifying, automating, and centralizing data protection for both cloud and on-premises resources.
• Backup Plan: Users can create backup plans that encapsulate backup frequencies, retention policies, and lifecycle management.
• Backup Vault: A logical construct for organizing and securing backups, with features like IAM policies and Vault Lock for immutability.
• AWS Organizations Integration: Allows centralized management of backup policies across multiple accounts.
• Backup Audit Manager: Monitors backup activities and compliance, with the ability to create custom controls and generate reports.
• Disaster Recovery: AWS Backup provides solutions for both hybrid environments and cloud-native applications, with options for cross-region and cross-account copies.
• Customer Case Study (Asurion): Matthews from Asurion shared their journey with AWS Backup, including challenges, goals, and implementation details, such as creating a standardized data protection framework across accounts and regions, and establishing an air-gapped backup solution.
• Announcements: New AWS Backup features and services were announced, including support for Amazon S3 Cross-Region, Cross-Account Backups, Amazon FSX backups, application-aware support for CloudFormation, and extended support for databases like Amazon Redshift and SAP HANA on EC2.

Insights

• Exponential Data Growth: The exponential growth of data underscores the increasing importance of robust data protection and governance strategies.
• Complexity in Data Protection: As organizations use a variety of AWS services, managing data protection policies becomes complex, necessitating a centralized management system like AWS Backup.
• Compliance and Auditing: Compliance is a critical requirement for many organizations, and manual auditing is cumbersome and error-prone. AWS Backup Audit Manager addresses this by automating the monitoring and reporting of compliance.
• Hybrid and Cloud-Native Strategies: AWS Backup is designed to cater to both hybrid (on-premises to cloud) and cloud-native (entirely on cloud) data protection strategies, reflecting the diverse infrastructure setups of AWS customers.
• Integration with AWS Services: AWS Backup's integration with AWS Organizations and other AWS services like CloudTrail and CloudWatch enhances its ability to manage and secure backups across an organization's AWS environment.
• Customer-Centric Development: AWS's approach to developing AWS Backup, which involved working backward from customer requirements, emphasizes the importance of customer feedback in product development.
• Practical Implementation: Asurion's case study provides a practical example of how AWS Backup can be implemented at scale, including the use of infrastructure as code for deployment and the creation of an air-gapped backup solution for enhanced security.
• Continuous Innovation: The announcement of new features and extended support for additional AWS services indicates AWS's commitment to continuous innovation and addressing evolving customer needs in data protection and governance.