Breaking Free from Manual Backups

Delivering End-to-End Cloud Backup Assurance

A leading design and development agency, specialising in building digital applications for high-profile clients. As providers of web hosting services for their customers, they wanted to move away from their existing backup solution to one that was cloud-based.

The client approached Hydras, part of the Acora Group, with the brief to design and build them a reliable, cloud-based automated solution where storage and manual intervention would not be an issue. In addition, the solution needed to provide a minimum set of security controls that included encryption, data loss prevention and data protection.

Designing a Secure and Automated AWS Solution

Based on these requirements, our team designed and built a cloud backup solution based on the open-source Linux tool Amanda. The new system enabled all hosting servers at their previous provider to back up directly to AWS S3.

The solution incorporated pre-backup checks, custom scheduling, incremental backups and automated alerts and monitoring so the team could always see when a backup ran successfully, or when something needed attention. And because the data now lived in Amazon S3, the client benefited from highly durable storage without ever needing to think about capacity constraints again.

Security and resilience were built in from the start. Backups were encrypted at rest using AWS KMS with a client specific encryption key, while S3 cross‑region replication and object versioning protected against data loss or corruption. AWS Macie automatically scanned backups for sensitive information and alerted the team when action was required. To keep storage costs under control, we also implemented an automated retention policy that overwrote backups after a set period.

Reliability with Security Built In

By moving to a cloud‑based backup solution, they now has a secure, reliable, and fully resilient backup infrastructure. They no longer need to worry about storage limits, data loss, data leakage, or silent failures, and they achieve all of this at a remarkably low ongoing cost thanks to the efficiency of the services used.