What is Amazon Glacier? What are its Uses?

Are you investing heavily in data storage? Yes, you do because DATA is critical to your business and needs optimal protection. Now the question is how to save on the data storage costs? The answer is Amazon Glacier. It is a cloud storage platform developed and launched by AWS with longer retrieval times. This means you can use Amazon Glacier to move less accessible data to archive storage to save on storage costs.

Traditional storage solutions are expensive, and capacity requirements are also a major concern. The old method has some drawbacks, such as capacity needs and unnecessary costs.

If you’re looking for data backup and archiving, Amazon Glacier is simple, convenient, and affordable. Read on because you want to know more about what is Amazon Glacier…

Data Archiving Revolutionized by Amazon Glacier

The AWS Management Console provides direct options to easily create or configure Amazon Glacier storage. The size of glacier archives ranges between 1 byte to 40 terabytes. This means. you can upload different types of data under the range as per your need. Amazon Glacier stores virtually all types of data in archives and vaults.

In simple words, Amazon Glacier puts no limit on archives, you can have one or multiple archives within AWS Glacier. For ease, a dedicated multipart upload feature is offered by AWS S3 Glacier for high reliability and throughput upon the archives more than 100MB in size.

You can group the archives in specific vaults and manage their accessibility through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Additionally, a feature named ‘vault lock’ is available under which compliance can be set for vaults for archives. After you set a vault lock, Amazon Glacier will implement the given configurations to meet the compliance standards.

Uses of Amazon Glacier

It is very important for a company to prioritize disaster and failure management. Additionally, businesses need to understand the vitality of backing up important data so that it can be restored in the event of an internal failure or disaster. Of all the uses of Amazon Glacier, this is one of the most important that makes it so incredibly essential. Having said that, let’s take a look at its other uses.

Data Archive 

Businesses focus on meeting compliance regulations to run their operations seamlessly. And that is the reason why finance, healthcare and other similar businesses must store data for longer-duration for meeting the compliance needs. Data is king for every business, but financial and medical services collect crucial information therefore it becomes even more essential for them.

Amazon Glacier is a saviour with immediate retrieval or restoration in urgency. Retaining data for long periods of time does not sound economical but Amazon Glacier is quite affordable.

Deep Archive

Amazon keeps introducing new features to make its services better. To achieve this, AWS Deep Archive is a new storage class associated with Glacier. Deep Archive aims to archive data for a very long period of time, for example 10 years or more.

Deep Archive aims to provide low prices for archiving data that is critical to regulatory compliance or maintaining government records. Deep Archive prices are lower than the standard Amazon Glacier storage service. Therefore, we can conclude that considering Deep Archive would be a good choice.

Backup & Restore

Planning for disaster recovery is essential when managing or archiving sensitive data. This is an important part of managing and protecting the business in the event of an emergency data crisis. It doesn’t matter if you run your business environment through the AWS Cloud or other hybrid cloud solutions. Amazon Glacier helps you protect your data as a backup without paying too much.

If you are experiencing a data crisis and want to recover the data stored in AWS Glacier, several recovery options are available to get immediate access to the data. The recovery time objective (RTO) determines the urgency of the recovery. Regardless of your RTO, you have instant access to your data.

The Bottom Line