Well-funded data protection startup Clumio Inc. today debuted a new solution, Clumio Protect for Amazon S3, that it says can help companies mitigate ransomware attacks targeting records they keep in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 storage service.

S3 is one of the most popular services in the entire public cloud ecosystem. Some companies use S3 to host information generated by their AWS-powered applications. Others rely on the object storage service to power data lakes that analyze business information to find useful insights. S3 is also a popular choice for backup use cases: Many organizations use it to keep contingency copies of important records, such as files from on-premises databases.

The large amounts of data that enterprises’ S3 deployments contain makes them a target for hackers. According to Clumio, its newly announced solution mitigates the risks posed by cyberattacks by making it impossible for hackers to delete or encrypt a company’s data permanently.

Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 creates so-called immutable backups of the data that organizations keep in S3. Immutable backups can’t be deleted or modified even by administrators. As a result, hackers can’t temper with the files either, which means that a company always retains the ability to restore files lost in a cyberattack.

Clumio offers its cybersecurity technology alongside capabilities that the startup says make it easier for companies to comply with data regulations.

In some industries, enterprises are legally required to retain important business documents for months or years. In other areas, companies face the opposite requirement and must delete files after they’re no longer needed to comply with regulatory expectations. There are even some scenarios where multiple regulations may apply to the same dataset. 

Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 provides a monitoring dashboard that, according to the startup, allows administrators to quickly determine if there are any records not stored in accordance with regulations. For added measure, Clumio generates alerts when detecting new files that don’t meet compliance requirements. 

An equally important factor for companies when it comes to data protection is the question of how quickly backup copies of files can be recovered. The sooner a dataset is recovered after an outage, the faster a firm can resume business operations. The opposite is also true: Drawn-out restoration processes have the potential to broaden the impact of data loss events.

According to Clumio, its technology is capable of reducing the amount of time necessary to restore information from hours or days to a few minutes. With the startup’s platform, administrators can recover only the specific files that were lost in a breach instead of launching a time-consuming bulk restoration of the entire affected data repository.

For enterprises, Clumio is positioning its solution as a more compelling alternative to building a custom S3 data protection workflow. “After hundreds of customer conversations, what quickly emerged was that the complexity and inefficiency of trying to build your own backup solution for S3 is too painful for any enterprise,” said Chadd Kenney, Clumio’s vice president of product. “S3 is massive and requires a cloud-native data protection solution that is built from the cloud up.”

The introduction of Clumio Protect for Amazon S3 should create new revenue opportunities for Clumio. The countless companies that have mission-critical data in S3 represent a large addressable market. Additionally, Clumio can promote the solution to existing clients. 

Previously, Clumio brought its data protection technology to Microsoft 365. Organizations can use the startup’s platform to back up records in Microsoft 365 Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint. Clumio also provides features for protecting information in Amazon EC2 instances, the Amazon Elastic Block Store block storage service and databases running on Amazon Relational Database Service.

Clumio is backed by about $186 million in venture funding. Clumio raised most of the capital through a $135 million investment in 2019 that, the startup said at the time, was the largest-ever Series C round raised by an enterprise software-as-a-service company within two years of its launch. 

Image: Clumio