> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://clumio.reclear.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What is Clumio?

> A conceptual overview: what Clumio protects, how protection works, and the ways teams work with it.

Clumio is a cloud data protection platform for backing up and recovering workloads in AWS and Google
Cloud. It is agentless: you do not install software in your cloud accounts, and there is no backup
infrastructure to provision or manage.

You connect cloud accounts or projects to Clumio, define how their resources should be protected, and
restore protected data when you need it. The same workflows are also available through the REST API,
SDKs, and Terraform tooling, for teams that manage protection programmatically.

## How Clumio fits into your cloud environment

Clumio runs as a hosted service alongside your cloud accounts rather than inside them. You onboard an
account or project, and Clumio discovers the resources it contains in the regions you have enabled.

```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart LR
  AWS["AWS accounts"] --> CP["Clumio control plane<br/>portal, API, configuration"]
  GCP["Google Cloud projects"] --> CP
  CP --> DP["Data-plane regions<br/>backup and restore"]
  DP --> Vault["Clumio-managed vault<br/>separate from your accounts"]
```

Each tenant is associated with a **control plane** — the regional Clumio service that hosts your
portal, your API access, and your configuration. A control plane maps to a set of **data-plane
regions**: the regions where your resources live and where their backups are taken and stored. The
control plane you choose therefore determines which regions you can protect, where your backed-up
data resides, and which API base URL your clients call.

Because protection is driven by configuration rather than installed agents, adding resources to an
existing account does not require new infrastructure — Clumio discovers them and applies the
protection you have defined.

## The protection lifecycle

Most work in Clumio follows the same four stages.

```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart LR
  A[Connect] --> B[Protect] --> C[Monitor] --> D[Restore]
  D -.->|restore to another account or region| B
```

1. **Connect.** You onboard a cloud account or project and Clumio gains scoped, least-privilege
   access to it.
2. **Protect.** You decide *what* to protect and *how*. A protection group selects resources, either
   explicitly or by tag, and a policy defines the backup frequency, retention, and storage tier. Rules
   let a single policy serve several cases.
3. **Monitor.** Clumio records backup tasks and raises alerts. Reports and audit records show what was
   protected and what changed.
4. **Restore.** You choose a recovery point and a target, and restore the whole resource or a subset
   of it — to the original account and region, or another one.

The separation between *what is protected* and *how it is protected* is what lets protection scale
without per-resource work. [Protection model](/protect/overview) explains it in more detail.

## Ways to work with Clumio

| Interface                | Use it when                                                               |
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Clumio portal**        | You want to configure and operate protection interactively.               |
| **REST API**             | You are integrating Clumio into another system or a script.               |
| **SDKs**                 | You want typed client code for Python or Go rather than raw HTTP.         |
| **Terraform**            | You manage cloud infrastructure as code and want protection to follow it. |
| **Automation utilities** | You are onboarding or restoring at scale.                                 |

[Developer tools](/developer-tools/overview) compares these and links to each.

## Where to go next

* [Core concepts](/get-started/concepts) — the vocabulary used throughout this documentation.
* [Protection model](/protect/overview) — how policies, groups, and rules compose.
* [Support matrix](/reference/support-matrix) — which workloads and versions are covered.
* [Choose a developer tool](/developer-tools/overview) — portal, REST API, SDKs, or Terraform.
* [Protect an AWS account](/get-started/quickstart) — a guided first backup and restore.