Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

In the realm of professional services, ZS Associates stands out as a firm dedicated to partnering with businesses to develop and deliver products that enhance customer value and drive results. With over 35 years of expertise and a global team of more than 8,000 professionals in over 25 offices, ZS is passionately committed to empowering companies and their clients to prosper.

Background

As a provider of data-driven services, ZS Associates relies heavily on effective backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategies. This task is particularly challenging given the complexity of our operations, which utilize a multitude of cloud applications across more than 150 AWS accounts. Our data applications and storage are primarily hosted on AWS, taking advantage of services like Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, Amazon EC2, Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Aurora. Therefore, we needed a data protection solution that could not only manage our backups uniformly but also comply with enterprise security and regulatory standards.

In this blog post, we will elaborate on:

• The implementation of AWS Backup to centralize and automate our data protection efforts across AWS services.
• The advantages we have gained from this solution, including savings in operational costs and staff hours.

Challenges Prior to Adopting AWS Backup

Before integrating AWS Backup, ZS Associates depended on third-party backup tools, which failed to meet our comprehensive requirements. While these tools provided some support for backing up specific AWS services, we had to develop proprietary solutions to cover AWS services that the third-party vendor did not support. We also created a custom governance framework to ensure a cohesive view of our AWS environment. Aligning with our information security policies necessitated additional tooling to oversee backup aging, retention, and replication across various AWS services. Consequently, we ended up with a compliant yet overly complex ecosystem that required continuous monitoring and improvements.

Transition to AWS Backup

Upon the launch of AWS Backup in January 2019, ZS was among the initial customers to adopt the service. AWS Backup allowed us to centralize and automate our backup processes across all AWS accounts, enabling a consistent approach for backup and DR across multiple AWS services. It simplified backup key management, lifecycle policy enforcement, organization-wide deployment, and governance. The built-in data protection features of AWS Backup provided us with added assurance that our backups are safe from both malicious and inadvertent deletions.

Seven Key Benefits of Using AWS Backup

1. Centralized Backup Policy Across AWS Services
   With AWS Backup, we established a uniform policy across various AWS services, enabling centralized management. This capability allowed us to configure backups for multiple services seamlessly.
2. Elimination of Third-Party Tools and Custom Scripts
   The integration of AWS Backup has rendered our reliance on third-party tools obsolete, simplifying the backup process and reducing maintenance overhead.
3. No More Snapshot Limit Requests
   AWS Backup alleviated operational burdens by managing soft limits on snapshot counts and replication without requiring manual intervention for limit increases.
4. Simplified EFS Backup Process
   Previously, we relied on AWS Data Pipeline for backing up Amazon EFS. AWS Backup has streamlined this process, aligning it with our overall backup strategy.
5. Protection Against Snapshot Deletion
   AWS Backup enhances security by preventing unintentional deletion of recovery points, providing peace of mind regarding our backups.
6. Improved On-Demand Backup Management
   The automation of on-demand backup creation and lifecycle management has led to better oversight and protection of our backups, reducing the risk of accidental deletions.
7. AWS Support Coverage
   AWS Backup is covered under AWS Support, which is included in our AWS Enterprise Support plan.

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