When organizations shift their data to the cloud, they need to protect it in a new way. The cloud allows you to move data to a secure, highly scalable, and cost-effective environment. But this migration brings with it new levels of risk that must be managed. Organizations must prioritize the protection of their business-critical data — including AWS services — as part of an integrated strategy to achieve data resilience.
When planning for data security, especially in the cloud, it's important to know what you're protecting. Who has access to the data? Where does it live? How can it be recovered? This information can help you identify potential risks and vulnerabilities that may result in data breaches as well as determine how best to protect against those risks.
Redundancy is also an essential aspect of any successful cloud data protection strategy. By creating multiple copies of your data in different geographical locations within your AWS environment, you can ensure that no matter where your instances may fail, there will be another backup copy available to take over its workloads and ensure continuous business operation. Using replication within a region is not enough; you need to replicate data across regions as well (for example, from US East to US West).
So how can you safeguard your AWS data from vulnerabilities? Let’s take a look at three steps you should take:
1) Understand What's Important to You and Prioritize Accordingly
Identify what you must protect. Organizations should identify those applications that are critical to their business operations, which may include personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property (IP), and other sensitive data stored or processed by AWS services. This may include applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances, or databases hosted in Amazon RDS.
2) Create a Security Baseline for These Applications
Develop a data security strategy that addresses both physical and cyber threats, with a focus on data protection, authentication methods, user roles, and permissions. For each identified application, organizations should create a security baseline to determine acceptable levels of risk and acceptable countermeasures to address them. For example, if an organization determines that its application is mission-critical, it may decide to create an additional copy of its data, isolated from the primary AWS environment, for business continuity or cyber resilience purposes.
3) Monitor Your AWS Environment for Potential Vulnerabilities
Implement technologies that help you monitor your environment for potential vulnerabilities so you can identify them early before they become serious problems. Once you've identified your needs, you can choose from several different types of solutions that can help protect your AWS data from accidental deletion, cyberattacks, and meet compliance requirements such as GDPR or CCPA. For example, in the case of credential misuse where a bad actor may maliciously delete backup snapshots, the administrator should be able to monitor job logs and audit trails, and rollback actions made by an individual to quickly recover deleted data. This provides the administrator with the ability to revert malicious or unintended actions without data loss and enable the rapid restoration of productivity.
Implementing a Strategy to Safeguard Your AWS Data
Implementing any one of these steps requires careful planning and consideration so that when disaster strikes (or even if it doesn't) there's no disruption. This is where Druva can help. As well as offering enterprise-scale snapshot orchestration capabilities for AWS data, Druva provides the ability to create air-gapped backup copies of your Amazon EC2 instances and attached (or unattached) EBS volumes, while also reducing storage costs by up to 50% when compared with storing snapshots in AWS.
Druva uses global source-side deduplication to compress encrypted and unencrypted data without storing customers' encryption keys, and always follows best-in-class industry-level security standards. By backing up Amazon EC2 data to the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, organizations reduce the operational complexity of managing multiple snapshot copies in AWS. You can also leverage additional features like policy immutability, app-consistent backups, and manual deletion prevention — and there are no worker instances that need to be spun in your account.
In conclusion, a robust AWS data protection strategy must include snapshots as part of your plan. However, redundancy considerations and secure copies are also crucial to compliance and cyber resilience requirements. To learn more on how to fill the gaps in your AWS data protection strategy, download our eBook below.
