Parchment

Parchment had been operating in multiple data centers, but went through a year and a half process to migrate their workloads to AWS. As part of that migration, they did a tabletop exercise that uncovered a gap in their backup and recovery strategy. Realizing they needed a better way to ensure their data’s resilience, they sought out Clumio.

Working with Clumio allowed Parchment to create air-gapped backups of their critical data in S3, ensuring recoverability in case of a data incident. Clumio is also an important factor in their acquisition strategy, helping Parchment get newly acquired companies’ data backed up quickly, even before the new company is fully integrated into Parchment’s data stack.

Transcript

It feels good to just put a solution in place that runs in the background that you know is doing their job and protecting you. But you don’t really have to think about it very much. I’m Aaron Budge, vice president of Production Engineering and IT for Parchment. We’re in the business of helping learners facilitate transactions like applying to and moving between colleges.

As a company, Parchment used to be in several data centers around the US. There was about a year and a half long effort to migrate everything into AWS. As we were going through some of the gap analysis and remediation, we did a tabletop exercise. We did not have a viable backup strategy that would allow us to quickly get our sites and services back up and running.

The thing that we were really looking for was a partner that provided air gapped backups in AWS. Clumio is keeping a version of all of that data, all of that information safe in another account, in another part of AWS assuring that if you end up having a problem, that they’re able to restore that data from backup so that you can be back up and running.

It’s primarily S3 data that we’re backing up, and that’s what I think is so important about Clumio. Even though availability on S3 is incredibly high, it doesn’t protect you from changes being made to a data set, especially not over a long period of time.

We have done a number of acquisitions over the course of the last several years. We basically are able to have Clumio backup their data and provide that same level of security without us necessarily having to do a full migration into the Parchment stack.

I would recommend Clumio. They solve a really important problem for us, providing the peace of mind that we needed to know that if we had a catastrophic failure or a ransomware event, that we would be able to use Clumio to get back up and running.