Clumio Extends Data Protection To Amazon S3

‘We decided to build the innovation that simplified the way data protection is done in [Amazon] S3 by classification, a bunch of embedded efficiencies, ransomware protection and compliance,’ says Chadd Kenney, vice president of product for Clumio.

Data protection software company Clumio unveiled its largest Amazon Web Services platform to date that provides ransomware protection through logical air-gap solutions.

The new platform, which is slated to launch in December, also provides the lowest Recovery Time Objective for business continuity, simplifies compliance reporting and optimizes Amazon S3 storage costs.

“We decided to build the innovation that simplified the way data protection is done in [Amazon] S3 by classification, a bunch of embedded efficiencies, ransomware protection and compliance,” Chadd Kenney, vice president of product for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Clumio, told CRN. “We believe this will really move the needle for [partners] in the ways that they‘re protecting [customers’] critical data sets.”

The platform is being offered through the channel and direct to end users through Amazon Marketplace.

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Amazon S3 has evolved from being used to store simple static images to now hosting business- critical datasets for cloud-native applications and data lakes for modern analytics.

Amazon S3 covers these business-critical datasets by storing S3 backups outside customers’ AWS accounts with the ability for customers to bring their own keys. Clumio’s new platform provides multifactor authentication with single sign-on integration and access controls for assets and roles. There is also no delete button so hackers won’t be able to get access to customers’ data.

Kenney said businesses using the public cloud use snapshots for data recovery, “which is great for operational recovery that gets you back to a point in time, but they don‘t have an air-gapped solution where they actually [provide] support outside the customer environment in a highly secured service.”

“That‘s incredibly important because it allows you to have a copy that’s always available no matter what happens, whether that’s accidental deletion, a bad actor, somebody maliciously getting access to the environment or actual ransomware that encrypted a bunch of data,” he added.

“Backing up cloud infrastructure data can be very challenging at scale because of the fragmentation that exists in such environments. That’s where Clumio is innovating with a solution that optimizes data protection for S3, provides simple data classification-based backup to meet compliance needs, and provides air-gapped ransomware protection,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, in a statement.

Part of the reason why Clumio moved forward with its new platform is because IT leaders have seen a massive shift in the use cases for S3 from peak capacity to business-critical applications, Kenney said.

This, paired with some of the cybersecurity challenges enterprises are facing, has partners trying to figure out how they‘re going to protect customers’ data sets, “and it became a very big challenge for them to solve,” Kenney told CRN.

With a core focus on public cloud, Clumio supports AWS native services, Microsoft 365 and VMware running in AWS.

“If you look at the rest of the market today, most of them are focused on the on-prem side of the house, and not much on the public cloud,” Kenney said. “We’ve been leaps and bounds ahead with focusing in on those types of customers and those types of use cases versus trying to broaden it out to every possible use case that’s out there.

“I’m excited to see how customers leverage the technology and once again just excited to see the customer use cases and how this continues to evolve for future use cases,” he added.