When EBS snapshots always replicate FULL data instead of incremental data to remote AWS regions, you may be in the “bad” situation of the the good, bad, and ugly of EBS snapshots.
We are living in a world where unfortunately, cyber-attacks and data thefts have become a reality. There has been a spur of cyber security incidents in the last few years and a lot of the public cloud users want to protect themselves from information leakages, data privacy threats and confidential breaches. While ransomware & malware has captured all the attention of late, most attacks happen because of internal reasons such as folks not following best practices, or a disgruntled employee deleting backups.
So how do you protect your organization from a scenario where you not only lose your production data but also lose all your backup data.
One way to achieve this is to keep production and backup data in two different AWS accounts.
But, what happens when you send AWS snapshots from one account to another? You no longer get incremental replication. Yes, you heard it right. No incremental replication. All fulls. Which means you are sending the entire data over and over and over again to your other AWS account. This increases your bandwidth consumption, remote storage consumption, time to replicate by up to 20x !!
Let’s take a similar example as we did in our last blog. Assume you have a 10 TB source database running inside AWS account #1 and you want to protect it to AWS account #2. With the native snapshot replication process in AWS, you will be sending all 10TB of data from account #1 to account #2 everyday. Compare this 500 GB per day replication, assuming a 5% change rate per day. That’s a 20x increase in bandwidth and snapshot storage in remote region.
An Ideal Solution?
So… what is an ideal solution that would help you avoid all of the above challenges? Imagine a solution that helps you move only the changed blocks of data from your first account to the second. Just the changed blocks, not the entire copy of data. This approach would drastically reduce your bandwidth consumption, remote storage consumption, time to replicate and the overall cost of doing backups.
Download the white paper to learn how the Copy Data Management solution delivers low RTO, low RPO, and 74% cloud infrastructure cost savings.