Amazon Web Services have recently announced their new storage class ‘Glacier Deep Archive’ on their Simple Storage Service – S3.
This storage class promises to be the lowest cost storage in the cloud, offering prices at around $0.00099 per gigabyte per month ($1 per terabyte per month)!
1st Week of GDA growing exponentially
Glacier Deep Archive is known as a ‘cold storage’ type and is primarily aimed at customers wanting to store large amounts of infrequently accessed data over a long period of time – think offsite tape storage, scientific data and archival audit data. All of this data is usually backed up to physical tape storage and then shipped off site to a safe place to be kept in the unlikely event it is needed again.
This usually involves paying someone to manage the tape infrastructure as well as consuming some of the ops teams valuable time to carry out menial tasks.
With the price of cloud storage now so cheap and the breadth of compatible tools that make it easy to transition.
“you have to be out of your mind to manage your own tape moving forward” – Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon offer a range of services that allow businesses to easily plug their existing tape storage software into the cloud, with appliances that mimic physical tape storage. This means that there is minimal change to existing business process and next to nothing cost in implementing the solution.
The Cloud can sound overwhelming to a newcomer, and so you’re bound to be plenty of questions about how safe cloud data storage is.
Could I lose my data in the cloud?
Amazon provides average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive and data is stored across multiple Availability Zones (geographic locations) for redundancy. Checksums are also used to validate the successful upload and retrieval of data (which is usually available in less than twelve hours).
Just how secure will my data be in the cloud?
Archives can also be stored in ‘vaults’ which act as containers to store archives. These vaults can be tagged, locked and have security policies attached to them specifying granular level access to certain users. What’s more – all of your data is encrypted at rest automatically using AES 256.
You can also be sure that the Cloud data centres are secure, with equipment monitored continually and access to the premises heavily secured there is a very good chance they are more secure than a business’s internally managed servers.
Companies like NASA, the Centres for Disease Control and even the CIA trust AWS to store their data reliably and securely.
Can I do more with my data now it’s in the cloud?
After moving your data securely, reliably and inexpensively to the cloud – it doesn’t stop there, now you can leverage the superb pay as you go cloud services to provide insights into your data. Machine Learning for example could be used to analyse and extract useful information from your data – predicting trends and forecasting costs.
The beverage company Sunny Delight was able to increase profits by $2 million a year and cut $195 000 in staffing cost through cloud-bases analytics.
Storing archive data in the cloud or using the cloud to host backup material is an excellent first step in the journey to migrate your business to the cloud. It offers a glimpse at the untapped potential your business can leverage whilst minimising cost and any risk to service.
