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).

##