How to Choose the Right AWS Cloud Storage for Your Data?

Data is an important asset to operate business activities and functions. Without proper storage of data, the business can’t drive competitive advantage. The presence of accurate data storage strategy and proper security helps you to stay ahead in your market. Besides, an enterprise must have easy access and organized storage. By working on flexible and smooth storage, an enterprise can maintain, monitor and handle their confidential information easily. AWS cloud storage is a promising solution to save your company’s data because it provides data recovery options, backup storage features, data encryption techniques to protect the data and much more. However, they’re different versions of AWS cloud storage each consisting of different price, performance, and storage sizes. In this blog, we talk about these versions and how one can choose the right option.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon S3 is a perfect storage for the internet as it has a flexible web service interface through which enterprise can store and retrieve a variety of data at any time and from anywhere. Amazon also uses the same infrastructure to execute the global network of web sites. It offers highly scalable, reliable, swift and cheap data storage features, helping the enterprises to extract the maximum benefits for scaling their data. 

Business enterprises can store an infinite amount of data and can access this data through REST, API SOAP and any other web interfaces. For instance, if you’re looking out to store data for videos, pictures, application data, select the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Similarly, it also works perfectly for hosting static websites, web content, financial transactions, clickstream analytics, disaster recovery solutions, business continuity plan and secure backup solution for data. It has no single point of failure, and it offers an optimized level of data durability and availability. The pricing options are divided into storage, request and data transfer packages. So, you can select any one of them depending upon your affordability and storage requirements.

Amazon Glacier

It is a low-cost storage option for archiving data and backup solutions. But since the data retrieval process by Amazon Glacier is too long, it should only be deployed where the enterprise doesn’t require access frequently. The performance is typically slow and takes a minimum of 3 to 5 hours to complete tasks. You can check the pricing list of Amazon Glacier here.

Amazon Glacier data storage option works best for off-site enterprise stores, digital and forensic preservation, magnetic tape replacement, media assets, research and scientific data.  

It provides unmatched durability, scalability, quick retrievals and sophisticated integration with AWS CloudTrail to log, handle, monitor, and retain storage API call activities. It also supports different security standards and compliance certificates such as FedRAMP, FISMA, HIPAA/HITEC, EU GDPR, PCI-DSS and so on. 

Elastic Block Storage

Amazon Elastic Block Storage or EBS is simple to use and extraordinary performance block storage service offered by Amazon. It is designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to support throughput and transaction-intensive workloads irrespective of scale and size. Intensive workloads including relational, non-relational databases, media workflows, big data analytic engines, file systems, enterprise and containerized applications.  

EBS has five different volume types and options to stable optimal amount and performance. If you’re working with high-performance database workloads like Hadoop and SAP HANA, then you can acquire single digit-millisecond latency for your workloads. 

EBS is also a cost-effective storage option as you can shift from one volume type to another. Moreover, you can change the volume size and tune performance without interfering critical business activities. It allows you to build applications of different sizes, whether it demands only single GB storage or petabytes data. The volumes are duplicated within AZ (Availability Zone), and you can utilize EBS Snapshots with computer-generated policies to back up your volumes in Amazon S3 along with the protection of data. 

AWS Storage Gateway

In contrast to others, it is a hybrid cloud storage service to offer on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. It is designed to ease storage management and cut costs for key hybrid cloud storage use cases. For instance, if you want to move backups to cloud, use on-premises file shares backup by cloud storage and require low latency access to the data in AWS, then AWS Storage Gateway is a perfect choice. File gateway, volume gateway and tape gateway seamlessly communicate on-premises applications to cloud storage. Thus, simple, low-latency, optimized transfers, cloud-integrated, durable, scalable and secure are the prominent features of the AWS storage gateway. 

The above descriptions clarify that Amazon S3 is a more suitable approach in terms of availability, durability, and it offers seamless integration with the third-party services. Nonetheless, EBS is a more preferable option than Amazon S3 due to its high performance traits.