Taking regular snapshots of your data is the logical first step for any robust data protection strategy for AWS GovCloud. However, there is a need for the snapshot management capabilities for AWS backups and a complete solution that keeps your AWS GovCloud data safe and easily recoverable from any scenario. Good news! CloudRanger now supports AWS GovCloud regions for backup and recovery of AWS workloads, which will allow US government agencies and customers to avail the benefits of data protection services for AWS environments.

This feature brings to you a wide range of capabilities and benefits such as backup and recovery, AMIs, centralized global management, alerts and reporting, and governance and compliance.

For more information about this feature, see https://cloudranger.com/aws-govcloud-backup/. You can learn more about the availability and location of AWS GovCloud regions here.

Note: Contact Druva sales for licensing information and sign-ups.

When you think of disaster recovery, the first thing that comes to mind is whether or not the disaster recovery system you’ve chosen can give you fool-proof assurance about your data’s safety. Add to that the benefits and flexibility of setting up the granular details, you are sure to become, let’s just say - Happy!

Here's some exciting news! With DR 2.0, we’ve taken several steps towards making your DR mechanism, right from creating a DR plan to a failover, as simple as possible. The new capabilities include a revamped left navigation menu and significant DR workflow enhancements to make your disaster recovery planning even easier.

Druva CloudRanger DR 2.0 features include

If you are already an existing customer with DR plans, DR 2.0 is currently not available to you. We will be in contact with you shortly to migrate your DR plans to the new version.

New Disaster Recovery (DR) plan workflow includes environments and DR plans

Environments

The first thing you need to do to set up DR 2.0 is to create environments. An environment is a collection of AWS network and security resources for an application within a single region. But what’s the point of doing this, you might ask? Simplification and flexibility! Environments are just a way of grouping your resources in a way that makes sense for you. Here are a few benefits:

DR plans

After you create an environment, creating a DR plan is your next step. You can now create disaster recovery plans based on your business service level objectives (SLOs) that are, RPO and RTO. You can also automatically test DR plans for readiness and optimize them based on your needs. But are we done with listing what you can do with the DR plans? Not yet! Take a look at the benefits:

Druva CloudRanger has had a big visual makeover! Our navigation changes include a cleaner look-and-feel, new navigation, an easier way to to see app information and more. Here are the changes:

The new navigation menu is now live across for all Druva CloudRanger customers. If you have any questions related to the new navigation, please contact our customer support team via email cr-support@druva.com or through the 24/7 chat within the Druva Cloudranger console.

You may need to refresh your browser to see the new changes in the Druva CloudRanger dashboard.

With this release, we have simplified the process of updating the auto-sync time of your AWS account. You can now update it on your own.

To do this, simply go to Account Settings and select a preferred time for auto-sync on the AUTO SYNC TIME drop-down list.

CloudRanger now has a simpler, more intuitive onboarding process to get you set up in minutes by simply connecting to your AWS account via an IAM role. This update makes a new user's experience more seamless and structured.

For more details, refer to Create a CloudRanger account.

When a user clicks to create a new backup policy, they are now presented with a pop-up window containing four templates, which can be used to create the new policy.

Templates available to the user are as follows:

This feature enables the user to create a backup policy with minimal effort; hence, saving them time and effort. A random CRON value is generated for each template to ensure that policies are fired at different times and not all at once, which is important for the performance and execution of CloudRanger users' policies.

The templates are also automatically tagged indicating the type of template used when creating the policy, for example, TwiceDailyTemplate. This helps the users to distinguish between policies created using templates and policies created manually.

The user can also continue without using a template for more complex policies by clicking Continue without using template.

This enhancement allows users to copy AMIs with marketplace product codes across AWS accounts using a method recommended by AWS. By default, this is disabled to stop users from circumventing increased pricing for launching instances from these AMIs. With this enhancement, CloudRanger users gain the ability to copy these kinds of AMIs across AWS accounts while the product codes do not get lost.
This has been achieved by privately sharing the AMI with the target AWS account, launching an instance from that AMI and then creating a new AMI from the newly launched instance.
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To copy a shared AMI with a billing product code, launch an EC2 instance in your account using the shared AMI and then create an AMI from the instance.
For more details, refer to the AWS Documentation.

Users who have seen the following error message before: “Images from AWS Marketplace cannot be copied to another AWS account” will now see this copy attempt complete successfully rather than result in a failure.

This enhancement to the CloudRanger policy allows users to specify a KMS key to encrypt with when backing up data to another AWS account. Keeping data encrypted in the cloud is of the utmost importance for many cloud users. Users can now modify their backup policies and in the copy section, they can choose target encryption keys. They also need to grant the CloudRanger role for the target AWS account access to the KMS in the source AWS account.

Notes:

CloudRanger now supports setting a backup schedule for multiple days in a week.

Indexed snapshots contents can now be browsed from file-level restore of a snapshot. Additional options to search for the index and download files within a snapshot are also now supported.

Restore of a snapshot as an instance now supports options to specify the instance architecture.

A new section Network Settings has been added within Account Settings > File Search Settings to specify the subnets for file indexer to run.

CloudRanger now supports AWS region ‘Stockholm’ (eu-north-1).