VMblog recently
spoke with Joe Merces, founder and CEO of Cloud Daddy, to learn more about the
company and its core offering, Cloud Daddy Secure Backup.
VMblog: Thanks for spending some time with us today,
Joe. Let's get right down to it. How would you describe Cloud Daddy?
Joe Merces: In today's elastic cloud world,
agility combined with security go hand-in-hand, and both are required. Cloud
Daddy Secure Backup is modern data protection for today's elastic cloud world. You
can think of the Cloud Daddy Secure Backup solution as a Swiss army knife for cloud
data protection. We provide the
only AWS-native product offering that combines the three critical parts of data
protection (backup and disaster recovery, advanced security, and infrastructure
management) into a holistic offering for AWS users. Enterprises can get Cloud
Daddy directly from the AWS Marketplace, with no hardware requirements or
associated costs, and be up and running in minutes.
Cloud Daddy Secure
Backup provides a single pane of glass view
of backup and replications, no matter where in the world AWS has a regional presence.
We've already seen that, using this solution, enterprises can save money,
improve manageability, and reduce potential security risks to AWS
infrastructure - all while avoiding the costs
that you might otherwise incur from installing hardware in data centers.
VMblog: It's hard to believe something like that
doesn't already exist.
Merces: Exactly! As the migration of infrastructure to
the cloud has accelerated, traditional backup, disaster recovery and security tools
designed for use within on-premises data centers have continued to be leveraged
due to preexisting customer investments in those tools. Legacy backup solutions,
for example, have remained anchored to the traditional data center with
software agents on every server. And yet, most enterprises still aren't able to
get a complete view across all these different aspects of data protection
without using multiple solutions or
tying back to legacy systems.
Part of
the reason why you haven't seen a comprehensive offering like this before is
because, as an industry, we didn't have to deal with the kinds of new demands
on IT infrastructure that we all encounter today. Just a decade ago, when you were
talking about disaster
recovery, you really meant things like whether a natural disaster might bring
down your on-premises data center. These days, cyber crime and cyber threats
have been added to the mix. As a result, you have to continually think about
secure backup and recovery.
Add in the
increased demands that will be coming from the Internet of Things, and you
really need a single view across all these elements.
The simple fact is
that you'll always have to manage and maintain your infrastructure, whether you
host it yourself or get it as a cloud service. OS updates, security patches and
application patches will always be part of the day-to-day responsibilities for
an optimally working IT infrastructure, along with up-to-the-minute patches to
address the latest cyber threats.
That's why the
Cloud Daddy Secure Backup solution was born - to provide modern data protection
for today's elastic cloud world and to do it cost-effectively and reliably.
VMblog: Wouldn't this be something a company should
expect from AWS itself?
Merces:
Some of your readers might be surprised to find that you aren't
guaranteed to have everything secure
just by migrating your infrastructure to AWS. There's a "Shared Responsibility
Model" under AWS that makes security in the cloud the customer's
responsibility; AWS only provides security
of the cloud. This means AWS is responsible for relieving you of the
burden associated with hosting the hardware, down to the virtualization and
physical security of data center facilities it operates, but the customer is
still responsible for securing whatever they're putting within AWS. So the responsibility
and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security
patches) as well as application software - and even things like security groups
- are the same as the obligations within your own data center, and they remain
the customer's responsibility. AWS isn't going to update or patch your operating
systems or application software for you.
So the only way to
provide holistic data protection is with a solution like Cloud Daddy's Secure
Backup. This approach gives you the advanced security countermeasures that are
absolutely essential for end-to-end AWS data protection.
VMblog: Would you explain a bit about the backup features
your solution provides?
Merces: Certainly. As far as backup is concerned, Cloud Daddy offers
application/crash-consistent backups based on a native Amazon Snapshot API.
Users have flexible backup schedules
and recurrent jobs, and tag-based backup and restore for easier search and management. Users also
can schedule backups from minutes to months, and retain these backups using a
variety of factors, such as the number of recovery points, or the age of
snapshots.
Restore and replication can be set up across regions and accounts,
accessible by multiple tenants, with regular email alerts and reporting. Full
machine replication is available to any AWS region anywhere in the world and we've
seen disaster recovery and restore speeds down to mere seconds.
VMblog: And what about security?
Merces: In terms of advanced security features, Cloud Daddy Secure Backup users
gain AWS web application firewall
integration with instance-based firewalling and rules designed and built-into
the solution. Security groups can be set and managed, and detailed firewall
logs are always available to offer deep insight into levels of protection setup
through the system, for coordinated use with other security and analytic tools.
Rule templates make adding and customizing new rules fast and easy and can be customized
to allow or block traffic inbound or outbound and deployed within minutes,
which is essential for quick response to the kinds of changing traffic patterns
that may emerge under cyber security threats.
All of this is
made easy using Cloud Daddy Secure Backup. Users can see their entire AWS
infrastructure through an easy-to-understand interface that shows both
protected and vulnerable instances. Any authorized administrator can back up,
manage and recover assets - even from one AWS region or account to the other.
VMblog: It sounds like you've incorporated a powerful
set of features into your launch. What's coming down the road for Cloud Daddy?
Merces:
Our product calendar is already full
of the kind of continuous enhancements that will ensure Cloud Daddy Secure Backup always stays ahead of
the backup, security and management concerns that occupy so much of an IP
professional's day.
We're not only
building out features; we're also implementing state of the art technology like
artificial intelligence and machine learning within the solution. In fact, we
have a US patent pending on the technology that will form the backbone of
features for an advanced security system we'll be introducing in subsequent
iterations (starting as early as Release 2.0).
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