The Client

Spitfire Digital is a leading design and development agency based in London that specialise in building digital applications for high profile clients.

The Problem

Spitfire Digital provided a web hosting service for their customers and wanted to move away from their existing backup solution to one that was cloud based. Spitfire approached Hydras 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

The Solution

Based on these requirements Hydras designed and built a cloud backup solution, based on the open source linux tool Amanda, that could backup the content of the various hosting servers from the existing hosting provider directly to AWS S3.  The solution provided pre-backup checks, custom scheduling, incremental backups and automated alerting and monitoring so that Spitfire were fully aware when backups ran or failed.  Additionally, being in AWS S3, the backups were highly durable and Spitfire never needed to worry about storage.  Hydras also ensured that the backups where encrypted at rest using AWS KMS with a dedicated encryption key that was accessible to only Spitfire staff.  S3 cross region replication and object versioning was enabled in order to protect against data loss and finally, AWS Macie was enabled which scanned the backups in order to identify potentially sensitive data (such as credit card numbers) that would then alert the Spitfire team so that they could take the appropriate action.  In order to ensure costs did not continue to grow the backups were scheduled to be overwritten after a set period of time.

The Outcome

The resulting solution is that Spitfire have a reliable and secure backup infrastructure with a high level of security built in.   They no longer need to worry about storage, data loss, data leakage or silent backup failures.  Additionally they achieve this at very small cost due to the nature of the services used to build the solution.