Acronis Backup 12 Closer Look – Amazon EC2 Backup

There is no surprise that overwhelming majority of companies are choosing cloud solutions, and when it comes to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), most go for the market leader – Amazon EC2.  Yet, not many cloud users realize that the cloud data also needs protection. According to various reports, a whopping 80 percent of organizations using cloud services have lost business data.

In fact, some Google customers using the Google Compute Engine (GCE) europe-west1-b Persistent Disk storage lost their files after the lightning struck the data center four times in a row, causing a storage integrity issue. Fortunately, not many customers were affected, and according to Google, “the amount of data lost is minuscule.” Following the incident, Google reminded its customers to create GCE backup snapshots and store them in the Google Cloud Storage for extra protection.

While Google was able to recover most of the lost data, you cannot assume all of your IaaS vendors would be able to do the same.  Relying on your IaaS vendor to back up your data without your involvement and control is like relying on your old car to drive itself straight when you are not holding the wheel. As I said in my previous posts, you must protect your cloud solutions following the same strict data governance standards, corporate regulations, and business continuity policies that you apply to on-premise backups.

You may argue that your data protection solution does not support your Amazon EC2 services. Then, maybe it is time to consider upgrading your outdated backup software to a more modern option?

The good news is that there is an easy Amazon backup solution — Acronis Backup 12. In addition to protecting your physical servers, virtual hypervisors and hosts, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, Acronis Backup 12 can also protect your Amazon EC2 instances.

Simply add your Amazon EC2 Instance to the Acronis touch-friendly web console, install the agent, and schedule your backups as you would with any other Windows® or Linux® machine. You can use any available storage — shared folders on any of your Amazon EC2 Instances, your on-premise storage (if you have connectivity back to your data center), and reliable and secure cloud backup with Acronis Cloud Storage.

You can recover files, folders, documents, and databases from your virtual machines. You can even restore your entire instances. If necessary, you can increase disk capacity during the recovery. You can even restore an Amazon EC2 instance backup to dissimilar hardware, such as a physical server or virtual machine in your own data center!

This means you are not locked into the cloud. You can migrate your systems to the cloud as well as from the cloud. This is yet another example how the industry’s easiest and fastest backup solution delivers control to you — the IT administrator!

Try it for yourself. Check out Acronis Backup 12 today and experience the industry's best Amazon EC2 backup and data protection.