5 AWS Backup Best Practices for Reliable Data Protection

Jan 27, 2025 | Articles, Security Articles

Ensuring the security and reliability of your data is mission-critical. AWS offers robust backup services to help you safeguard your information, but leveraging these tools effectively requires strategic planning. Here are five best practices to maximize the reliability of your AWS backups and protect your data from unexpected loss or corruption.

1. Implement a Comprehensive Backup Strategy

A well-rounded backup strategy starts with identifying critical data and workloads. Not all data has the same value to your organization, so prioritize backups for your most sensitive and operationally essential files. AWS Backup simplifies this process by enabling you to create centralized policies that automate backups for various AWS services, including Amazon RDS, Amazon EBS, and Amazon S3.

2. Leverage AWS Backup Vault Lock

Backup Vault Lock provides an additional layer of security for your backups by enforcing Write Once, Read Many (WORM) policies. This ensures that your data cannot be deleted or altered during a specified retention period, protecting it against accidental deletion or malicious activity.

Why it matters: Vault Lock is particularly useful for compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA that mandate data immutability.

3. Automate Backup Scheduling and Monitoring

Manual backup processes are prone to human error, which can lead to missed backups or incomplete data protection. Use AWS Backup’s scheduling features to automate backups at regular intervals. Pair this with CloudWatch metrics and SNS notifications to monitor backup status and receive alerts for any failures.

Actionable Step: Set up AWS Backup Audit Manager to generate compliance reports and ensure your backup operations align with internal policies or external regulations.

4. Test Your Backups Regularly

Even the most advanced backup system is only as good as its recovery capabilities. Regularly test your backups by performing restore drills to ensure data integrity and recovery speed. This practice helps identify potential issues before a real disaster occurs.

Best Practice: Use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) to simulate disaster recovery scenarios and verify that your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) align with business requirements.

5. Optimize for Cost Efficiency

While data protection is essential, it’s also important to manage costs effectively. Use AWS’s storage tiering options to balance cost and performance. For instance:

  • Store frequently accessed backups in Amazon S3 Standard.
  • Move infrequently accessed backups to Amazon S3 Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive to save on costs.

Pro Tip: Take advantage of AWS Backup’s lifecycle policies to automatically transition older backups to lower-cost storage tiers.


Need help with your AWS backup strategy? Contact us to learn how our experts can support your cloud journey.

Cost Optimization

Issue: Small AWS deployment with little management oversight and a lack of cloud skills internal to the organization moving from traditional infrastructure to SaaS and cloud based solutions.

 

What we did

  1. AWS Audit
  2. Cost Optimization Review
  3. Ongoing Monitoring

 

Result:

  • Eliminated unused storage volumes and the old application server no longer in use, the charges for AWS resulted in a savings of 51% per month.
  • We’ll continue to monitor AWS billing and finance to ensure maintenance of savings and identify other future changes.

Cost Optimization

Issue: Small AWS deployment with little management oversight and a lack of cloud skills internal to the organization moving from traditional infrastructure to SaaS and cloud based solutions.

 

What we did

  1. AWS Audit
  2. Cost Optimization Review
  3. Ongoing Monitoring

 

Result:

  • Eliminated unused storage volumes and the old application server no longer in use, the charges for AWS resulted in a savings of 51% per month.
  • We’ll continue to monitor AWS billing and finance to ensure maintenance of savings and identify other future changes.