AWS Backup Service for Continuous Data Security
Discover how to achieve data protection with outsourced AWS backup management, automating backups, monitoring, and restore-test reporting.
Our Customer
Subscription Management Platform
Darwin CX is a subscription‑lifecycle management platform designed to help publishers, membership organizations, and media companies transition from print to digital. Their services automate every step – from subscriber acquisition through renewal – so media‑centric businesses can build and scale recurring‑revenue models efficiently and sustainably.
THE CHALLENGES
Reliable and Auditable Backups Across the Organization
The client’s business depended on continuous access to their databases – any data loss could halt operations entirely, as the platform’s functioning is primarily dependent on reliable backups. They needed an AWS Backup service setup to protect critical data and satisfy audit requirements.
Key challenges which customer faced included:
- Enabling Backups Organization‑wide
Coordinating AWS Backup solution across all accounts required aligning DevOps and development teams and environments to avoid gaps in coverage. Any missed account left critical data at risk of loss or service interruption. - Backup Tagging Issues
Developers had to apply specific tags (backup=true, backup/rds=true) to every resource, or backups would be skipped. Incorrect or missing tags exposed databases to potential downtime and delayed recovery. - Job Monitoring Gaps
Manually tracking backup, copy, and restore tests across accounts was time-consuming and error‑prone. Lack of centralized visibility slowed down both incident response and feature deployments. - Alerting Response Delays
Alerts needed to reach Slack instantly during business hours and email for audits, or failures went unnoticed. Delayed or misrouted notifications increased outage impact and complicated post‑incident reviews.
THE SOLUTION
End‑to‑End AWS Backup and Reporting Automation
We developed a tailored AWS Backup solution that ensures continuous data protection and minimizes manual intervention from developers’ side.
Infrastructure as Code for Deploying
By codifying the entire environment with Terraform and Terragrunt, our team ensured every service—backups, monitoring, testing—could be deployed identically across accounts, reducing manual errors and drift.
Individual Backup Configurations
Rather than a single AWS Organizations backup policy, we deployed per‑account backup plans. This allowed us to inject replacement parameters for restore tests—workarounds for missing default VPC and RDS subnet group resources that couldn’t be recreated automatically.
Parameter Injection for Restore Testing
By isolating each backup configuration, we could specify non‑default VPC IDs and custom DB subnet group names, restoring RDS snapshots successfully even when AWS defaults had been deleted.
Grafana‑based Monitoring
Using Terraform, dashboards and alert rules were provisioned in Grafana (sourcing metrics from CloudWatch), giving DevOps and developers real‑time visibility into backup, copy, and restore job health.
Automated Restore Testing and Reporting
A Lambda function, scheduled via EventBridge, ran restore tests on a set cadence, aggregated the outcomes, and emailed formatted reports through SES (Simple Email Service)—ensuring stakeholders received timely, consistent audit records.
AWS Backup Operations Architecture
THE RESULTS
Intelligent AWS Backup Managed Solution
Our experts designed and implemented a fully configured AWS Backup solution for Darwin CX, delivering continuous monitoring and automated restore testing—ensuring both the team and auditors have complete confidence in their data protection.
Key achievements in details:
- Comprehensive Backup Coverage
All accounts and resources are protected by AWS Backup solution, ensuring no critical data is overlooked—minimizing the risk of business‑stopping data loss. - Real‑Time Monitoring
Backup to capture the data snapshot essential for recovery, copy operations, duplicate data without the inherent recovery features, and restore job metrics flow into CloudWatch, which are visualized in Grafana. - Alerting via Slack and Email
Failures trigger real‑time alerts to Slack during business hours and to the client’s audit email, thereby promoting responsibility and compliance, simplifying internal auditing, and building trust in backup processes. - Automated Restore Testing
A Lambda function automates restore testing by collecting results and emailing them via SES, ensuring reliable recovery and creating a clear, timestamped audit record that eliminates compliance gaps and review delays.
Why Romexsoft
Cloud Storage Solution with Integrated Backup
Romexsoft is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with deep expertise in automating cloud-native solutions. Our AWS Backup implementations enable continuous data protection, centralized monitoring, and automated restore validation. Businesses gain full data and recovery coverage, reduce operational overhead, and meet compliance standards.
We automate backup and storage management, ensuring visibility benefits through:
- 100% backup coverage across multi-account AWS environments
- Minimum manual intervention for tagging, testing, or monitoring
- Automated restore tests with timestamped audit reports
- Grafana dashboards provide access to backup, copy, and restore.
AWS Backup as a Service FAQ
AWS snapshots are point-in-time copies of Amazon EBS volumes, capturing the entire disk at the storage level. They are incremental after the first full copy and are mainly used for disaster recovery or quickly restoring an EBS volume. AWS Backup is a centralized service that automates and manages backups across multiple AWS services such as EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, EFS, and FSx. It provides scheduling, lifecycle policies, compliance reporting, and long-term retention. So, snapshots are low-level storage copies, while AWS Backup delivers policy-driven, organization-wide data protection.
In AWS, data backup is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, maintaining the infrastructure, availability of storage, and durability of services like Amazon S3 or EBS. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud; this includes configuring, scheduling, and monitoring backups of their workloads, databases, and applications. AWS provides tools such as AWS Backup, EBS Snapshots, and RDS automated backups, but it is up to customers to use them correctly to meet their recovery, compliance, and retention requirements.
Yes. AWS offers services that extend backup capabilities beyond the cloud to on-premises environments. With AWS Backup and AWS Storage Gateway, organizations can securely copy, store, and manage backups of their on-premises databases, file systems, and applications in AWS. This allows businesses to centralize protection, meet compliance requirements, and take advantage of AWS scalability and durability while keeping local workloads integrated.
Pricing depends on the service, storage class (warm or cold), and restore operations. For example, in the US East (N. Virginia) region:
- Warm storage is about $0.05 per GB-month for EBS and EFS, while RDS is $0.095 per GB-month beyond free-tier allowances.
- DynamoDB storage is about $0.10 per GB-month, with cold storage options at $0.01–$0.03 per GB-month depending on service.
- For restores, EFS retrieval is typically $0.02 per GB from warm storage and $0.03 per GB from cold storage.
- DynamoDB restores are about $0.15 per GB. EBS and RDS have no restore fee through AWS Backup, though standard charges apply when new volumes or databases are provisioned from the restored data.
