What is Amazon Glacier?
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Amazon Glacier is a cloud storage platform from AWS designed for archiving infrequently accessed data at a lower cost. It offers features like vaults, accessibility management, and compliance locks while charging for storage used and retrieval requests. Use cases include regulatory data archiving, backup solutions, and the replacement of traditional magnetic tape storage.
What is Amazon Glacier?
- 1. What Is Amazon Glacier?
- 3. Introduction to Amazon Glacier Amazon Glacier is considered as a cloud storage platform developed and launched by AWS with longer retrieval times. Under this, a developer is meant to use Amazon Glacier for the purpose of moving the less accessible data to archive storage for saving costs on storage. Therefore, Amazon Glacier took over this hassle and brought in a convenient and cheaper solution for data backup and archiving. There is more to it that you will get to know while you continue with this article further. In which the size of glacier archives ranges between 1 byte to 40 terabytes. In short, there is no limit to uploading data into an archive or creating several archives within AWS Glacier. There is a dedicated multipart upload feature for high reliability and throughput upon the archives that are above the size of 100MB.
- 4. Revolutionary Ways of Amazon Glacier These ways give the AWS users are allowed to group the archives in specific vaults and manage their accessibility through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). A host can be assigned to each of the vaults, and notification policies can also be implemented with it. It is solely upon the AWS admin to execute the resource-based access policy for each vault of archives. Hence, the accessibility limits can also be set for the hosts permissible to access selected archives. Along with the vaults of archives, there is a feature named ‘vault lock’ under which compliance can be set for each of them. Once a lock is initiated, Amazon Glacier implements given configurations for meeting the compliance standards.
- 5. Pricing Policy of Amazon Glacier Amazon Glacier has a very subtle pricing policy under which it charges for every one gigabyte of storage used per month. Uploading the data to Amazon Glacier is free, while the platform charges only for the retrieval requests. It is implemented as such to prevent the customers from solely depending upon Amazon Glacier for their general data storage needs and use it only as storage of archives infused with infrequently used data.
- 7. Use Cases of Amazon Glacier Storage has always been a core necessity within an IT infrastructure. Every business today revolves around data in one way or the other. Therefore, it is quite important for people to store data on priority for long-term needs. There are certain requirements embedded with a specific set of data. It means that some data is required to be readily accessible at most times while some data is not required frequently. Therefore, putting such data in cold storage such as Glacier is a smarter option.
- 9. 1. Data Archiving for Regulatory Purposes Businesses are facing the necessity of archiving data for several compliance regulations. It is mostly required within the healthcare industry as the patient data is to be stored in large numbers for a long period of time. There cannot be any vulnerability in the storage of such sensitive data. But, the cost of storing the data of such an amount for over decades or more might be extremely high.
- 11. 2. Replacement of Magnetic Tapes The tape libraries are still being used in some applications, irrespective of whether they are stored on-premises or off-site. Hence, these storage aspects are costly and require maintenance over time to ensure security and reliability. Amazon Glacier is considered to be one of the ideal replacement options as it is integrated as a managed service.
- 13. 3. Backup & Restore for Emergency Situations Disaster Recovery planning is quite important when you are dealing with or storing sensitive data. It is a crucial part of running a business and ensuring protection during any emergency data crisis. It does not matter whether you are running your business environment over AWS cloud or any other hybrid cloud solution; Glacier can help you secure your data in the form of a backup without charging much from you.
- 14. 4. Digital Media Archiving The companies that are dealing with digital media such as news footage, large movie, gaming projects, important clippings, and others need to store these media or archive them for the long run in order to use them in future scenarios. Digital media is mostly of a bigger size, such as gigabytes or terabytes.
- 15. 5. Amazon Glacier Deep Archive Solutions Amazon Glacier is working on improving the products and introducing new features. Therefore, AWS Glacier Deep Archive has been introduced for users who are demanding very long-term storage solutions at low pricing. With the Deep Archive feature, the data can be stored cost-effectively for over a decade or more.
- 17. Conclusion These are a few of the things that define the usability of AWS Glacier for the businesses that deal with sensitive data that are to be stored for a long period of time. Today, Amazon Glacier is termed to be a top-tier storage solution that is secure and durable with its services.
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