How TUI modernized their backup strategy with AWS: Driving clarity and scale

TUI, Europe’s leading travel company, operates across 180 holiday destinations with development teams managing diverse Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads across multiple accounts—from customer-facing applications to internal analytics platforms. The company processes millions of customer transactions daily, necessitating robust systems with reliable data protection and backup capabilities to ensure business continuity.

As TUI’s cloud footprint expanded, teams faced challenges balancing their focus on delivering customer value with the need for enterprise-level resilience through efficient backup management. To ensure business continuity during disaster recovery scenarios, TUI needed isolated backups that would remain accessible even if production systems were compromised. However, creating this isolation was particularly challenging, necessitating significant time investment and specialized knowledge, adding operational overhead and pulling resources away from core development activities.

To overcome these challenges, TUI built an enterprise backup platform using AWS Backup as the foundation: a centralized, automated service designed to reduce operational overhead and accelerate development workflows across their organization. This post explores TUI’s implementation approach, the technical architecture behind the solution, and the measurable business outcomes achieved, offering a blueprint for organizations looking to streamline their backup strategy.

The challenge: Balancing developer experience and operational efficiency

TUI’s development teams manage a wide range of AWS workloads across multiple accounts, supporting everything from customer-facing applications to internal analytics platforms. Although their primary focus is building innovative travel technology solutions, backup processes often introduced complexity and slowed down delivery.

Building isolated backups for disaster recovery scenarios proved challenging, requiring specialized AWS expertise and pulling resources away from core development activities. Their existing approach had several limitations:

• Complexity in implementation: Backup processes were separate from standard development workflows, which created overhead.
• Inconsistent expertise: Implementing backups required specialized AWS knowledge that varied across team members.
• Scalability concerns: Ensuring a solution that works efficiently across their AWS Organizations without requiring specialized expertise from each team.
• Support for diverse workloads: Backup implementation varied significantly across different AWS services, particularly for Amazon DynamoDB-based applications, requiring the cloud platform team to develop specialized approaches for NoSQL workloads alongside traditional database and storage services.

The solution: A centralized enterprise backup platform

To address these challenges, TUI built a centralized enterprise backup platform focused on delivering simplicity and scalability. They used AWS Backup to create an automated, organization-wide solution that integrates with existing workflows, reduces operational overhead, and empowers development teams to concentrate on building customer value.

Figure 1: High level architecture of the enterprise backup platform showing automated workflows and cross-account capabilities

How it works

The enterprise backup platform transforms backups from a complex, manual process into an automated workflow that integrates seamlessly with existing development practices. The platform uses familiar tagging mechanisms and infrastructure as code (IaC) patterns that developers already work with every day, eliminating the need for teams to learn specialized procedures or manage separate infrastructure. This approach scales efficiently across distributed teams with varying AWS expertise levels.At its core, the platform automates the entire backup lifecycle – from initial resource enrolment through long-term retention and cross-account recovery-using AWS services configured for enterprise-grade reliability.Key features include:

• Isolated backup storage with logically air-gapped vaults: Backups are stored in AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults within a dedicated “data bunker” account, providing tamper-proof storage that prevents unauthorized modifications and ensures backups remain accessible even if production systems are compromised.
• Tag-based automation: Development teams add standard tags to their resources, automatically triggering appropriate backup schedules using AWS Backup plans -whether daily snapshots, weekly archives, or long-term retention, with the flexibility to add custom backup plans as needed.
• Automated deployment with AWS CloudFormation: CloudFormation handles all infrastructure provisioning, eliminating manual configuration and ensuring consistent deployment across accounts in approximately 10 minutes.
• Integrated workflows: Backup becomes part of the standard development process. Teams using Terraform can enable backups with a simple configuration change.
• Secure cross-account restore capabilities: When teams need to restore data or create development environments with real data, they can restore to different AWS accounts by sharing logically air-gapped vaults with AWS Resource Access Manager. All restore operations require Temporary Elevated Access (TEA), ensuring strict authorization protocols prevent unauthorized data access.

Implementation: Clarity at scale

The cloud platform team designed the enterprise backup platform with one guiding principle: make backups effortless for developers. The solution prioritizes automation and clarity, reducing operational burden and removing the need for specialized expertise.

Deployment highlights:

• 10-minute setup: AWS CloudFormation templates deploy to each AWS account in approximately 10 minutes, with no manual configuration needed
• Standardized processes: Restore operations follow consistent procedures, providing speed without adding complexity

“The enterprise backup platform significantly improved our operational workflows while ensuring we meet our data protection requirements,” said Paul Schwermer, TUI Cloud Engineer.

By reducing operational complexity, the platform particularly benefited team members with varying AWS expertise levels. Developers could focus on core technology solutions rather than backup infrastructure management, democratizing access to enterprise-grade data protection across teams with different skill sets.

Business impact: efficiency meets agility

TUI’s enterprise backup platform turned backups from an operational challenge into a strategic advantage, removing friction points that often slow development teams.

Transforming the developer experience

Development teams can now provision environments with production-representative datasets in minutes rather than hours, reducing setup time and improving iteration cycles. The tag-based automation integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, eliminating the need for deep understanding of service intricacies, cross-account architectures, or retention policy management.

Delivering strategic value

The platform’s approach of abstracting infrastructure complexity while maintaining robust data protection capabilities enabled TUI’s development teams to focus resources on application-specific value delivery. Clear audit trails and documented recovery procedures streamline compliance demonstrations, while the logically air-gapped storage architecture provides robust protection against inadvertent data loss through administrative errors or security incidents. Intelligent scheduling and lifecycle policies optimize storage costs across multiple AWS services (Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Aurora, DynamoDB).

This implementation demonstrates that enterprise-grade solutions can achieve both comprehensive functionality and operational simplicity, allowing development teams to maintain focus on their core competencies while the cloud platform team manages backup infrastructure.

Key takeaways and looking ahead

TUI’s enterprise backup platform demonstrates that the most successful technical solutions emerge when operational simplicity becomes a core design principle rather than an afterthought. By embedding backup into standard development workflows through familiar tagging mechanisms and infrastructure as code patterns, consistency follows automatically.

This approach proved transformative because it shifted backup from a separate operational concern to a natural part of resource provisioning. The result is a platform that supports distributed teams with varying skill levels while removing manual processes that previously consumed valuable development time.

TUI continues to enhance the platform with plans to incorporate advanced AWS capabilities, reinforcing their commitment to operational simplicity and scalability. Their success offers a proven blueprint for organizations seeking to modernize backup strategies without slowing innovation – demonstrating that enterprise-grade solutions can achieve both comprehensive functionality and operational elegance when designed with the developer experience at the center.

Ready to transform your backup strategy? Learn more about AWS Backup and discover how your organization can achieve the same operational efficiency, developer productivity, and scale.