Knowledge Base For Startups

source_url: https://aws.amazon.com/startups/learn/turning-back-the-data-clock-with-rewind title: "Turning back the data clock, with Rewind"

Turning back the data clock, with Rewind

Rewind is taking an innovative approach to software-as-a-service (SaaS) resilience and enabling enterprises to recover lost data with precision. The Rewind platform automatically backs up data from applications by capturing incremental changes to information at the account level, meaning businesses can maintain critical operations even during SaaS outages and security issues.

"We're doing something that enables people to effectively go back in time with their data in order to change something that would impact them going forward," says James Ciesielski, co-founder and CPTO, Rewind.

Founded in 2015, the company emerged from a common challenge experienced by SaaS users who'd experienced data loss issues. "Ultimately, they were just really frustrated by the fact that they couldn't pick up the phone, call the SaaS platform's support team, have them hit a magic undo button to fix whatever problem it was they were encountering," explains Ciesielski.

In the early days, these users were small businesses, many of which were unaware of the shared responsibility model that governs SaaS data management. Travel forward 10 years and Rewind now empowers over 25,000 organizations—including large enterprise teams—with compliance-ready SaaS data backup, recovery, and resilience solutions. For enterprises of this size, "you can imagine the challenge [data loss] may have from a business continuity perspective, as those tools are key to the productivity of teams." Rewind developed its platform to align with the needs of its expanding customer base, building enterprise-grade backups that enable large businesses to enhance their data resiliency and meet compliance requirements.

The startup superpower

Unlike in Rewind's early days, its customers today are more aware of the shared responsibility model, and with many working in highly regulated industries, these organizations face another challenge: the need to adhere to strict and complex compliance and regulatory requirements. Rewind is enabling this, offering a "more proactive than reactive" solution, and has seen rapid business growth as a result. That speed, says Dave North, VP Cloud Operations and Security, "is the superpower that AWS gives, particularly to startups."

Rewind has relied on a number of AWS solutions from its early days and is supported by managed cloud services on AWS. In September 2024, Rewind moved its ECS workloads from x86 to Graviton (ARM-based) processors on AWS Fargate, achieving significant improvements in both performance and cost efficiency. It is also leveraging Amazon S3 cloud storage, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), among others: "There's no service we're not using!" says Ciesielski.

Listing its solutions on AWS Marketplace, and sponsoring AWS re:Inforce and AWS Summit Toronto, have increased visibility for Rewind and made it easier for customers to buy. The company plans to scale up this activity going forward: "I would say we're just starting to touch the surface on the co-marketing and co-selling side with our partner," says North.

Rewind embarked on this partnership early in its startup journey. Working with AWS was a "no-brainer," says North. "As a startup, AWS just makes it super easy to get started and they have everything you need." This breadth and depth of offerings were particularly important as Rewind grew its business: "We needed the power and the flexibility of all these different service offerings that AWS had," says Ciesielski.

Fast-forward growth

In the space of just a few years, with AWS support, "there have been many projects as we've evolved our architecture," says North. As such, Rewind has enhanced its platform in order to serve an expanding customer base. "We've graduated to major banks, logistics companies, and other enterprise businesses, and we're excited to talk to even more going forward," says Ciesielski.

Rewind has enabled all of these customers to transform into time-travellers, and benefit from the platform's on-demand, granular recovery and advanced compliance features. Automatic backups, for instance, mean teams don't have to spend time maintaining backup scripts, which frees them to focus on value-add tasks. Rewind's secure, SOC 2-compliant backup and recovery solutions mean businesses stay compliant and audit-ready.

Within the SaaS platforms that companies rely on for their productivity or operations, even the smallest of mistakes or incidents can have a significant impact. "We're using public APIs that the platform exposes in order to capture changes to that data over time, and we provide a way for customers to recover the entirety of their account data, or we can get down to the very specific attribute level," explains Ciesielski. On an enterprise-level collaborative workspace platform, for instance, Rewind can hone in on granular details, restoring granular data such as a specific item status, in addition to recovering a full dataset.

Pay less, get more

Powering the evolution of the platform has been its partnership with AWS and the "super simple" migration to Fargate Graviton, says North. "For many years, we were running just regular Fargate," but following the announcement from AWS of Graviton support in 2024, "we were literally whooping!" As a result of the move, Rewind has seen a 25 percent reduction in costs: "We're paying less, but we're actually getting more performance," explains North.

The migration also delivered an additional benefit. As Apple Mac users, Rewind's legacy approach required its team to "basically build our software twice"—first, on AWS X86 processor architecture, and second, to run locally. Following the migration, "we cut our software build resources in half."

Unexpected and delightful

The ease of the migration can be attributed, in large part, to Rewind's decision to leverage managed cloud services on AWS and premium support. Working with AWS means Rewind can rely on key AWS experts within certain services "to help understand how we can use that service better or how we can influence a roadmap," adds Ciesielski. When Rewind encounters a problem in a production environment, for instance, the team can reach out to AWS to "talk through the scenarios that we're facing at the time; it's unexpected and delightful."

The managed services approach bestowed Rewind with another "superpower," Ciesielski continues, as "somebody else can deal with operations and you can go and work on something else." That superpower, he adds, "was really transformative for the business and gave us all kinds of options to explore new things that helped us get to where we are today."

And today, Rewind is a fast-growing company with ambitions to scale its business further and reach new markets. "It's easy to feel like a small fish in a big pond, but that's not the case with AWS," says Ciesielski. Instead, he continues, "they've built something that really makes a business of our size feel like it's on equal footing with the behemoth companies." This is supported by co-selling and co-marketing initiatives.

Similarly, sponsoring and presenting at AWS re:Inforce and AWS Summit Toronto has enhanced Rewind's brand awareness and increased its visibility among key stakeholders. AWS re:Inforce was "an amazing experience," says Ciesielski, who recalls delivering a session at the event during which he quoted a key figure at JP Morgan. Following the session, colleagues of the name-checked individual approached Rewind to share their positive feedback. Events are "super valuable," he continues, giving Rewind "an opportunity to meet with the people that are building some of these services that our business depends on."

Shaping the future

Rewind currently provides services in a number of different AWS regions, but with issues of data privacy and regulation high on the priority list of its customers, "I foresee us expanding there," says Ciesielski, enabling customers to scale into new markets whilst adhering to local legislation. In addition, Rewind's 2026 plan will be "more focused on this idea of continuity rather than just backup and recovery," says Ciesielski. "I see us leveraging some new and innovative things within AWS to help us accomplish that."

To make this vision a reality, Rewind relies on a partnership that matches its pace of innovation. "What still impresses me to this day about AWS is continuous improvement," says North. "I would describe AWS as an innovative company, and they're constantly improving things." Beyond technology, Rewind will also draw on the startup-focused support that has characterized the relationship. "AWS understands startups," says North, "and there's definitely an element of culture in AWS, particularly on the startup side, where you just feel like you're talking the same language."

That shared mindset has helped Rewind scale faster, test bolder ideas, and stay focused on growth. The startup may be turning back the data clock for SaaS users, but with AWS, Rewind is firmly set on shaping the future of SaaS continuity.

Just as Rewind is influencing major trends in its sector, startups across the globe have also been driving innovation in their respective fields with support from AWS. Over 330,000 have joined AWS Activate since its inception in 2013, accessing a range of resources to help build, grow, and scale their startup. This includes unlocking AWS Activate Credits, which can be used to help cover the costs of AWS services and solutions, from compute, database, and storage; to machine learning, containers, applications, and more. AWS Activate has already provided more than $7 billion in credits to startups, and yours could be next to benefit. Find out more about AWS Activate today.