Quick summary
- Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM) is a continuous process that involves scanning, tagging, and enforcing backup and retention policies to ensure compliance and data protection across cloud environments.
- CBPM requires accurately tagging resources by data type, applying the right backup policies based on that, and continuously monitoring for drift or policy violations.
- Effectively implementing CBPM in your company improves operational efficiency and allows you to cut backup storage costs by as much as 50%.
Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM) helps you protect data, stay compliant, and control backup costs—without relying on manual checks or incomplete snapshots.
As cloud environments grow, backup responsibilities often slip through the cracks. A single missed tag or forgotten resource can result in months of unprotected data and significant compliance risk.
CBPM fixes this. It’s a continuous process of discovering resources, classifying data, implementing the right backup policies, and monitoring everything in real-time. When done right, it reduces risk, strengthens resilience, and puts you back in control.
The 4 Phases of Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM)
We used to think of CBPM as a checklist of best practices. But in practice, these best practices fall into four clear, repeatable phases—each designed to bring order to your backup landscape, reduce compliance risk, and keep costs under control.
Whether you're managing AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or all of the above, here’s what it takes to implement CBPM at scale.
Phase 1: Discover and Classify Cloud Resources
You can’t back up what you can’t see.
Start by continuously scanning your cloud environments to detect new or modified resources—whether they’re VMs, databases, object stores, or ephemeral services. Don’t rely solely on infrastructure-as-code (IaC)—untracked infrastructure and repurposed resources often live outside of it.
Once discovered, classify the data these resources hold. Is it PII? Healthcare data? Financial records? Each type has its own backup and compliance requirements. Use consistent tagging based on data type to lay the foundation for policy automation.
Phase 2: Define and Apply Backup Policies
Different data requires different protection levels. Once your resources are tagged, define backup policies based on those tags, including frequency, retention, encryption, replication, and immutability.
Then, apply them automatically. The key is consistency: policies should be enforced across all accounts and clouds, ensuring that nothing is missed and nothing is over-protected.
Without automation, teams often default to backing up everything “just in case,” which drives up costs without actually improving compliance.
Phase 3: Monitor for Drift and Enforce Compliance
Cloud environments change constantly—resources move, tags disappear, policies drift. That’s why monitoring isn’t optional. Even a single missing tag or misaligned retention rule can result in compliance violations or data loss.
Track backup posture in real-time, detect and remediate misconfigurations, and enforce required settings, such as cross-region replication or retention minimums. This is what prevents silent failures and surprise audit findings.
Look for tooling that consolidates backup and restore alerts across providers and automatically generates audit-ready reports.
Phase 4: Track Costs and Drive Accountability
Cloud backups can quietly become a budget sink if not managed well.
Use cost attribution and chargeback models to map backup spend to the teams or business units responsible. This promotes accountability, helps right-size retention policies, and prevents unnecessary duplication of low-risk data.
When teams see their own backup bill, they’re more likely to optimize it.
Why CBPM Needs to Be Automated
While the phases outlined above seem clear, putting them all together requires a lot of resources and attention. Tagging automation, policy enforcement, and reporting might sound simple, but stitching together AWS Config, Macie, Audit Manager, Lambda, and other cloud-native tools introduces both cost complexity and operational burden, especially at scale. And that's before accounting for the human time needed to monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain it all.
Automating CBPM with Eon
Building your own CBPM framework is possible, but it’s complex and costly to scale. Even with cloud-native tooling, implementing CBPM at scale isn’t cheap. Supporting services like resource inventory, data classification, and audit logging come with their own cost layers, before you even get to storage. Add in the time for writing scripts, chasing drift, and prepping reports, and the ‘DIY CBPM’ route becomes not just complex, but costly.
That’s where Eon comes in.
Eon is a fully integrated CBPM platform that automates the entire lifecycle:
- Continuous resource discovery across multi-cloud, multi-account setups.
- Automatic sensitive data and environment classification, removing manual error entirely.
- Backup policy orchestration maps directly to compliance frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA. For example, Eon automatically aligns PII-tagged backups with HIPAA retention rules and enables object lock to meet immutability standards.
- Centralized monitoring, audit reporting, and chargeback reporting across your cloud estate.
Eon replaces fragmented, costly workflows with a platform that automates backups and ingests them into an analytics-ready data lake. Your backup storage tier becomes queryable, visible, and easy to manage, so CBPM becomes the easiest part of your job.
Ready to check out Eon’s autonomous CBPM platform?
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