Top 12 Amazon AWS EC2 Backup Software Solutions in 2024

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is one of the world’s top cloud computing services. The popularity of EC2, part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, stems from various factors, including its ease of use, resizability, and outstanding processing power.

The data protection that Amazon EC2 promises is another important contributor to its fast-growing customer base. However, despite prioritizing security, Amazon Shared Responsibility Model hands variable data protection duties to the customer.

When using EC2, the customer is responsible for all necessary data protection and management tasks, while Amazon assumes responsibility for securing the AWS infrastructure. Tackling data protection can be a considerable challenge for customers who are unaccustomed to working on security. From natural disasters and outages to human error, accidental deletion, and ransomware attacks, there is no shortage of serious threats to data integrity in the industry.

Therefore, having a sturdy safety net for critical data and applications is essential to business continuity. Such a net should encompass monitoring, authentication, and configuration, among other aspects. AWS offers tools such as log file validation, Multi-Factor Authentication, log-file encryption, access control, SSH-key rotation, and others to help customers achieve higher data protection levels. However, these important tools alone are not sufficient to fully protect critical data. To achieve an adequate level of protection, a well-rounded backup solution that favors efficiency while optimizing resource usage has to be in place. A good data protection solution ensures that your business can:

Prepare for and recover from potential disruptions to business operations
Ensure continuous data security, integrity and availability
Reduce downtime costs
Preserve reputation
Retain customer trust
Maintain a high level of operational performance

The market has no shortage of backup solutions that offer reliable data protection functionality for Amazon EC2. To help you choose the perfect option for your budget and needs, we have compiled a top 10 list of the best backup solutions for Amazon EC2 out there.

Before we delve into the comparisons, it’s important to point out the indicators of a robust backup solution. Here are some key points and features to take into consideration before making a decision.

Solid integration with AWS: The AWS Cloud is distributed across 25 geographic regions around the world. In addition to offering compatibility across all AWS regions, you want to ensure that your solution of choice can protect all Amazon EC2 instance types and allows you to meet your regulatory and compliance requirements.
Adaptability: EC2 uses Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots to create point-in-time copies of data blocks. Tapping into this native technology via a good backup solution is crucial to ensuring a smooth EC2 instance backup. Another vital adaptability element is the ability to orchestrate backups based on your data protection needs while saving storage space and avoiding network bottlenecks.
Powerful feature set: When dealing with massive data blocks, it’s integral to have a set of useful tools that collectively help protect business data in various circumstances. Here is an overview of features to look for in a good backup solution.
Reliable backup: To ensure the protection of your EC2 data, it’s important to choose a comprehensive solution that protects entire EC2 instances, supports instant recovery, allows automation of backup jobs, and optimizes resource usage.
Ransomware resilience: Ransomware attacks cost businesses around the world hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Like any other cloud service, AWS is not immune to such attacks. Hence, a ransomware-resilient solution is critical for protecting your EC2 backup data against encryption by ransomware.
Swift recovery: In the event of a disaster, your priority becomes damage control and recovering corrupted or deleted data as soon as possible. Providing a good recovery time objective, as well as a recovery point objective, is an important characteristic of reliable backup solutions.
Improved performance: Good backup software should also provide performance-boosting tools that improve resource usage, boost backup speed, and reduce the load on your network.
Backup size reduction: The volume of data to be backed up is one of the most common challenges businesses have to tackle when backing up their data. Support for incremental backups, compression, global deduplication, and log truncation helps trim backup size.
Cost-effectiveness: Using a solution that can simultaneously protect multiple EC2 instances can help reduce overhead significantly. A scalable backup solution that does this at an affordable cost compared to others is a major plus, and using size-reduction to slash backup costs is one more step in the right direction.
Ease of use: One of the main attractions of Amazon EC2 is its simple web interface. The same should apply to your backup solution, as no one wants to waste precious time on navigating a complicated interface, especially during a disaster. A centralized web interface helps you manage all of your workloads and data protection activities with ease.
Regulatory compliance: Nowadays, data protection is strictly regulated in an ever-increasing number of sectors. With this in mind, backup solutions have introduced granular recovery features that help fulfill e-discovery requests and meet compliance requirements.

With that out of the way, here is our list of the top 12 best backup solutions for Amazon EC2.

BDRSuite

BDRSuite for AWS offers Secure, Reliable, and Cost-Effective cloud-native backup and recovery for AWS EC2 Instances. You can save up to 70% on Backup Costs with BDRSuite.

Agentless Backup of EC2 Instances with snapshots using Amazon APIs
Near-continuous data protection with flexible backup scheduling policies
Instantly restore the backed-up instances at the instance or volume level
Application-aware backup and Pre/Post Scripts
Extensive Reports with Email Notifications
Built-in search for faster backup & restores with filter type: OS, Instance, Availability Zones, etc
24/7 Exceptional Technical Support

NAKIVO

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an all-inclusive, agentless backup solution that can offer high-end backup and recovery services for multiple environments, including the AWS instances.

Run incremental, app-aware backups of your Amazon EC2 workloads
Store your backups locally and in public clouds
Create ransomware-resilient backups
Recover from deduplicated backups to ensure a continuity of business operations during downtime
Protect single instances based on the name, size, tag or protect an entire AWS EC2 region or account
Automate and orchestrate disaster recovery
Use a self-service model to offload the backup process from the Managed Service Provider (MSP) in a multi-tenant environment
Backup your EC2 instances to any AWS region or to a datacenter of choice
Install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a QNAP, Synology, ASUSTOR, NETGEAR, or Western Digital NAS device to create a powerful AWS EC2 data appliance
Use policy-based data protection to automate backup process
Apply Network Acceleration to increase network speed and reduce backup load
Use compression and traffic reduction methods to increase backup speed
Use Global Search to find deleted or unprotected items
Integrate NAKIVO Backup & Replication with monitoring, automation and orchestration solutions through the HTTP API to further enhance data protection
Implement AES 256 encryption to safeguard backups from unauthorized users

VEEAM

Veeam Backup for AWS native cloud backup solution. Get fast full and file-level recovery, greater security and much more!

Set and forget simplicity
Lowest cost backup
One platform
Fast and flexible recovery
Greater security and compliance
Cloud mobility

N2WS

N2WS Backup & Recovery Free Edition, you get Free AWS backup & recovery for AWS services, including Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS, Redshift, and Amazon Aurora.

Automate backups
Recover in 30 seconds
Disaster-proof data
Quickly deploy instances
Recover a single file
Create dev environments

VEMBU

Backup AWS EC2 instances with agentless cloud-native solution and agent-based solutions to same or different regions, public clouds or even local data centers.

Full Disk Image Backup
File-level Backup
Application-level Backup
Changed Block Tracking
Application-aware Image backups
Retention Policies
Automated Backup Verification
AWS EC2 Recovery
Instant Boot VM on Local Data Center
Instant File Recovery
Vembu Universal Recovery

RUBRIK

Rubrik provides reliable, secure and scalable software platform to backup your with confidence and eliminate data loss with point-in-time recovery and granular restores across multiple cloud environments.

SaaS-based Auto Discovery
Holistic Protection
Consumption & Compliance Reporting
RDS Native Protection
Data Archival
Replication
On-Demand Instantiation

COHESITY

Cohesity natively integrates with AWS to offer backup & recovery, disaster recovery, storage tiering, and cloud-native backup.

Ultimate Flexibility for Enterprise Backup
Long-term Retention and Archiving
Use Cloud for Disaster Recovery
Secure and Efficient Migration
Simplify Hybrid and Protect AWS Outposts
Unified Protection for VMware Hybrid Cloud

ACRONIS

Back up your VMs and endpoints. 15-second RTOs, Full Availability, No Downtime, 3 clicks to install the touch-friendly, web-based centralized management console, 2X faster than the closest competitor.

Complete Business Protection
World’s Fastest Recovery
Flexible Storage Options
Intuitive, Scalable Management
Innovative Data Protection

VERITAS

Veritas Backup Exec can work seamlessly with AWS to protect your data, increase business innovation while lowering IT expenses.

Modernize data protection and lower storage costs
Easily move data to AWS
Safeguard workloads in AWS

DRUVA

Druva and AWS Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution is driving the next evolution of data protection.

Ease of use

Unified platform for AWS backup/restore,
disaster recovery and archive
Automated deployment eliminates
implementation services
Consumption based storage pricing

Safe and secure

Encrypted data in-flight and at rest
Customer ownership of encryption keys assures only authorized users can access data
Primary data isolated from backup data averting propagation of ransomware

Operational efficiency

Global management from central console
Source deduplication removes redundancies across global data sources and any size dataset
Recover data into a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or clone VPC across AWS regions or accounts