Backup and disaster recovery has long been a core component of the services that MSPs offer to their end customers. But why do you need to backup your cloud data? Doesn’t the cloud provider have redundancies built in?
That’s the question that N2WS Marketing VP Ezra Charm used to get all the time when he started working at the company back in 2017. N2WS is a cloud native BDR company, and Charm describes it as a tool that provides BDR on top of major cloud providers. N2WS has been available on AWS for years. The company just updated its AWS implementation and also just added support for Microsoft Azure, too.
AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model
When people ask why they needed backup for cloud data, Charm tells them about AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model. Amazon protects the data centers themselves with redundant power and is responsible for the infrastructure, but it doesn’t take responsibility for the customer’s data inside that infrastructure.
“They're not giving away free storage and taking backups for you and you can't call them when somebody blows out your database and ask them to restore it unless you've taken backups yourselves because that's in the customer section of the of the shared responsibility model,” Charm told ChannelE2E.
Amazon’s own native backup service, which you can buy separately from Amazon, will provide you with backup for your data, but it is missing an important part of the whole BDR solution. Amazon's backup service doesn't include recovery.
N2WS Recovery Orchestration
The N2WS tool is designed to provide the recovery, too, and get organizations back up and running quickly.
N2WS has built its tool on top of the Amazon backup. Charm provided a hypothetical scenario of how it would work.
“Because AWS has this hyper availability in backups, it’s literally seconds to rehydrate a workload. What we’ve built on top of that is recovery orchestration where we can take five different AWS services that comprise a workload and we can say if you want to failover from region A to region B, first we are going to recover all the networking settings and then some EC2 settings and VMs and then we are going to recover a database. You can drill it and test it and have confidence that it works,” Charm said.
The Multi-Cloud Future and Avoiding Cloud Vendor Lock-in
The new capabilities that N2WS introduced in September include something really important for end customers and government customers -- a way to avoid cloud lock-in.
N2WS added support for Microsoft Azure Cloud with the new release that came out earlier this month. With that N2WS has enabled the capability to do a backup in AWS and move it into Azure Cloud.
“We have a lot of federal government customers who have mandates to avoid cloud lock-in,” Charm said. He said these new capabilities give organizations more control and enables them to manage data across multiple cloud platforms.
An N2WS History Lesson
N2WS is about 10 years old. In 2018 Veeam acquired N2WS, and it looked like a good match going forward of two backup providers. However, a big part of the N2WS business came from providing data protection on AWS including on AWS GovCloud. The U.S. government had requested information regarding the transaction, according to a report. Following that inquiry Veeam agreed to sell the N2WS business back to its founders.
