Clumio debuts ‘air-gapped’ backup for Microsoft 365

Clumio customers can now protect their Microsoft 365 workloads using the startup’s AWS-based data protection as a service. Backup account-separation is a key aspect of the new facility.

Clumio backs up Microsoft 365 user data in separate accounts and claims that this imposes an air-gap between the user’s account and the backup data. We think this stretches the meaning of ‘air-gap’, which generally describes offline tape cartridges that have no network connection, rather than two separate public cloud accounts.

Microsoft advises Microsoft 365 users to “regularly back up your content and data that you stored on the services or store using third-party apps and services.”  Clumio says it’s the best such third party backup service – competitors include Druva – citing superior ransomware protection.

A spokesperson told us: “Clumio’s service backs up the data outside the customer’s account in an immutable format to ensure that data cannot be compromised. This means that even when the bad guys get access to the customer’s network, they have no access to compromise Clumio’s data.”

He claimed: “Other solutions use the same security credentials for backup and production. Others keep backup copies, backup storage, or compute, in the customer’s production accounts leaving them exposed to ransomware or data loss if the account credentials are compromised.”

Clumio’s Cloud Data Fabric backs up VMware virtual machines running vSphere on-premises or in the VMware Cloud, using AWS S3 object storage. Clumio also provides general SaaS Backup for AWS, backing up apps in AWS accounts that use EC2 and EBS, and storing them in a separate account.

Read a Clumio blog to find out more.