AWS Public Sector Blog

Raising the bar on storage: How to improve your disaster recovery, ransomware prevention, and backup strategy

Data is an organization’s critical asset, which is why safeguarding it against ransomware attacks, natural disasters, emergencies, or technical failures is a top priority. Legacy data storage, such as tape, makes sharing and protecting data costly and time consuming.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) released a series of educational webinars and whiteboarding videos that discuss how to raise the bar on data protection in the AWS Cloud. Organizations can bolster IT resilience with secure backups, active archiving, and cloud-based disaster recovery that lowers costs, while strengthening their overall security posture to combat ransomware threats.

Check out these videos and resources:

Preventing ransomware using AWS

Why do ransomware attacks continue to take place? And how can public sector organizations protect their systems and data?

Organizations can choose to architect workloads into isolated Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and segment replication and backup into disparate regions to prevent the spread of ransomware.

AWS services can scale and simplify the process of how organizations secure their assets and recover, if needed. AWS Systems Manager helps streamline patch management. AWS CloudFormation generates ephemeral infrastructure for testing patches and security updates. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides durable and secure storage for point-in-time snapshots. And AWS Backup reliably automates and orchestrates those snapshots.

Also check out the latest AWS eBook, “Securing your AWS environments from ransomware.”

Improving your disaster response and recovery with AWS

How can AWS disaster recovery solutions help public sector entities better prepare against natural disasters such as hurricanes, volcanoes, and wildfires?

IT disasters such as data center failures, server corruptions, or cyber-attacks can not only disrupt your business, but also cause data loss, impact your revenue, and damage your reputation.

Organizations can build disaster resilience into every application for business continuity, security, and support for instant failover and high availability in disaster recovery scenarios.

For example, CloudEndure Disaster Recovery helps organizations with disaster preparedness and guards against technical or manual failures. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery continuously replicates your machines (including operating system, system state configuration, databases, applications, and files) into a low-cost staging area in your target AWS account and preferred Region. In the case of a disaster, you can instruct CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to automatically launch thousands of your machines in their fully provisioned state in minutes.

Extracting value from data backups and archives

While the cloud offers better scalability, building cloud-enabled backup solutions requires careful consideration of existing IT investments, recovery objectives, and available resources.

The growth of data worldwide has made managing backups more critical than ever before. With traditional methods such as tape libraries and secondary sites falling behind, many organizations choose to backup and archive data in the cloud. AWS offers a host of storage services, data-transfer methods, and networking options to build solutions that protect your data with durability and security.

AWS storage services can facilitate aggregation of secondary data for secure backups and archiving. Many view backed up and archived data–often referred to as secondary data– as passive data. Check out how organizations can use secondary data for analytics and decision making using services Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, and AWS Backup along with data lakes to run analytics.

Building security and resilience in a microservices architecture

Compliance and security of student and patient data are paramount to educational institutions, government, and healthcare organizations. AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner Infinitive covers how a decoupled application built using a microservices architecture allows layering in security upfront. The architecture secures data that is contained within a microservices component by only sharing it with other applications and microservices using the principle of least privilege.


AWS is here to help you improve your disaster recover, ransomware prevention, and backup strategy. Learn more about raising the bar on data protection and security.

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