Top 12 Amazon AWS EC2 Backup Software Solutions

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

DELLTECHNOLOGIES

Dell EMC is working with AWS to provide customers with the data management and protection needed for workloads in the cloud.

  • AWS Cloud Protection
  • Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS
  • SaaS platform built on AWS
  • Cloud Disaster Recovery
  • Long-Term Retention
  • Native Data Protection for AWS
  • Protection for AWS GovCloud

UNITRENDS

Unitrends can handle all of your AWS backup and disaster recovery needs with expertise, intelligence, and ease.

  • AWS for Remote Data Storage and Off Site Compliance
  • Protect AWS Workloads with Unitrends Backup Software Virtual Appliance
  • Move Data from AWS Workloads to Unitrends Cloud for Off Site Compliance

ACTIFIO

Actifio provides Cloud Backup, Disaster Recovery, Migration, and Database Cloning in AWS.

  • Cloud Backup with ZERO on-premises Storage
  • Reduce Cloud Infrastructure Costs
  • Low Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
  • Low Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
  • High I/O Performance
  • 1-click DR Orchestration
  • Cloud Snapshot Management
  • Accelerate Test / Dev / Analytics