Future Proofing IT (and Your Job) with AWS & Backup

Future proofing IT  is a popular term in the technology world, particularly when referring to cloud computing. A quick Google search will produce 1000s of cloud solutions touted as future proofing one task or another, a particular component of IT infrastructure, or a myriad of other hot button items that keep IT administrators up at night worrying about their job.

For many, Amazon Web Services appears to be at the top of the list when discussing future proofing information technology. It is presented as a platform which removes the everyday pain of managing an IT infrastructure. Upgrades and updates? They are invisible to the end user. Need more compute? Make a couple clicks in a dashboard and you have it. More storage? A couple more clicks.

Amazon has made this so easy, that their dominance in cloud computing has reached staggering levels. A recent report by the Synergy Research Group shows AWS continues to maintain 40% of the market share in an industry that is growing at 50% per year. Amazon’s market share is greater than the next three largest competitors, Microsoft, Google, and IBM combined.

A brief look at some of the companies that use Amazon AWS and its S3 storage service easily frames the scope of Amazon’s reach into our everyday lives. Imgur, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Reddit all store data on Amazon S3. Netflix has moved almost all operations to S3 because of the promise (and experience) of easily and quickly providing compute and storage on-demand. Company after company are moving to AWS to benefit from storage prices that can be lower than $0.004 per GB. But here is the BIG question; is the data safe?

This past week Amazon AWS was the big story in technology news when an inadvertent keystroke caused a more than a four-hour disruption in service for thousands of companies including Expedia, GitLab, GitHub, GroupMe, IFTTT, Medium, Nest, Quora, Slack, The Verge, Trello, Twitch and Wix. For all the companies impacted, the future proofing platform they relied on suddenly appeared vulnerable.

What about redundancy? Amazon does recommend distributing data across multiple regions, and companies that did were much better prepared than those who did not, but the wide-spread disruption of services show that even the largest of companies are not all using Amazon’s redundancy offerings.

Future Proofing Your Job

Are there steps that businesses of all sizes can take to protect their Cloud applications and data from becoming unavailable because of infrastructure failures or human errors? Steps that will protect an administrator’s job? The answer is yes, build a resilient Cloud data center.

• Protect your Cloud data as you would if it were on-premises. Copy it to another data center for disaster recovery
• Use multiple clouds. Don’t simply rely on one provider to store both production and replicated data
• Spread your risk. The great thing about so many Cloud options today is you have the ability to use different platforms for different applications. You spread your risks and have the benefit of vendors competing with each other on price

Unitrends is positioned well to help. A blog post we published last month has proven prescient. The post, titled simply AWS Backup, laid out our offerings that are used to provide backup and continuity of your AWS data.

• Replication, DRaaS, and recovery assurance from AWS to Unitrends Cloud
• AWS to Azure replication
• Replication from AWS to co-location data centers
• AWS to on-premises data centers replication

Last week proved that moving to a Cloud platform like Amazon Web Services does not absolve an IT administrator from the need to prepare for a disaster. Unitrends can show you your options and help you prepare for that next Cloud outage and keep your job.

For a deeper dive, sign up today for our webinar, Future Proofing IT (and Your Job) with AWS & Backup.

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