Posted On: Nov 27, 2022

AWS Backup now offers you the ability to create legal holds on your protected data beyond your defined retention policies, for legal and auditing purposes. Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold. With this feature, AWS Backup allows you to manage legal hold requests at scale and help prove compliance to outside counsel, auditors, and related third-parties. Together with AWS Backup Vault Lock, this new capability has been assessed by Cohasset Associates for use in environments that are subject to SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511, and CFTC Regulation 1.31. A copy of the Cohasset Associates Assessment report can be downloaded from the Backup Vault Lock technical documentation

You can get started with legal holds by using the AWS Backup console, API, or CLI. To create a new legal hold, you can select one or more resources or backup vaults to retain under this hold. You can further specify a creation date range for your backups. After adding tags and descriptions to categorize your legal holds, you can activate the legal hold on all selected backups.

AWS Backup’s legal hold feature will be available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm), South America (Sao Paulo), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Jakarta, Mumbai, Osaka Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Middle East (Bahrain), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more about AWS Backup, visit the product page and documentation. To get started, visit the AWS Backup console.