Many companies rely on Amazon EBS snapshots for backup and disaster recovery, but despite their power, they have limitations. Here’s why you need a cyber recovery approach.
Conventional snapshots have long been a critical component of backup and disaster recovery. However, these backups also represent static points in time, and cyber threats are anything but static. That’s why you need an active system that incorporates ransomware and malware scanning and comprehensive testing.
In this post, we’ll explore how augmenting Amazon EBS snapshots with data security will help you achieve cyber resilience. We’ll also discuss how an agentless cyber recovery solution can bolster your defenses.
#1. To gain comprehensive coverage
Cloud resources are primarily managed by DevOps teams, who often prioritize performance and operability, with resilience often being sidelined. However, when cyber resilience isn’t front and center, they can deploy mission-critical workloads without adequate protection. This creates serious security holes that may result in resources being unprotected and unrecoverable. Relying only on Amazon EBS snapshots offer no geographical or account-based redundancy, so if your AWS account is compromised, then your snapshots may be too.
#2. Add automation at the infrastructure level
The ephemeral nature of cloud workloads means there may be hundreds or even thousands of workloads being started, paused, or stopped over a relatively short period. When this happens, workloads and data might go unidentified and unprotected. After all, you can’t protect what you don’t have complete visibility into. Attempting to enforce coverage and compliance across all Amazon ECS instances and Amazon EBS volumes manually is a time-consuming and error-prone task as well, particularly for businesses with large AWS footprints.
#3. Protect against ransomware and malware
Relying solely on Amazon EBS snapshots provides little protection against one of the biggest threats facing businesses today – ransomware. Ransomware and other forms of malware are active threats, so you need active protection to stop them from entering your recovery points too. Businesses should never take their recovery snapshots for granted, and it’s essential that they understand their recovery risk. However, that won’t happen if the snapshots aren’t actively scanned during and after backup operations.
#4. To test your recovery points for recoverability
Recoveries are your last line of defense against threats such as ransomware and other forms of data loss, so they need to be reliable. The only way to determine your recovery risk is by thoroughly testing your recovery points rather than leaving them to chance. Cyber threats are increasingly targeting cloud environments, so they also need a well-documented disaster recovery strategy. This should include regular testing that helps you orchestrate data and application recovery at scale and to the highest possible standard.
#5. Gain granular, file-level restores
Amazon EBS snapshots are a convenient and powerful cloud-native solution. However, businesses cannot afford to compromise on recovery point objectives (RTO). To quickly recover from incidents like cyberattacks or data loss, it’s necessary to have the flexibility for granular recovery from individual files to EBS volumes to entire instances. This keeps operational disruption to a minimum while ensuring a fast and precise recovery.
Why Elastio cyber recovery for AWS?
Amazon EBS snapshots continue to play an essential role in operational resilience, but they are far from immune to today’s constantly evolving cyber threats. As technology advances and cloud environments change, threat actors are always looking to stay a step ahead by learning how to evade conventional protective measures like snapshots.
Given the increasingly dynamic and complex nature of many enterprise cloud environments, it’s important to take an active approach to protect them. This must incorporate a cyber recovery system complete with agentless active ransomware and malware scanning and recovery testing that has zero impact on the performance and availability of production systems.
