Amazon is looking to become the world's tape backup store, introducing a new cloud service called "Glacier", which it says will offer "secure, reliable and extremely low-cost" retention of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month.
The move could disrupt companies which have for years offered digital archiving services – but, Amazon suggested, should hugely lower overheads for companies which have to retain data for long periods for future reference or for legal reasons.
The service, announced on Tuesday morning, is initially aimed at data that is "infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference". It cited as examples digital media archives – such as films or TV episodes – financial and healthcare records, genome sequence data, database backups and data that has to be held for "regulatory compliance".
"Companies typically over-pay for data archiving," Amazon said in its press release. "First, they're forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilised capacity and wasted money."
By contrast, Amazon Glacier uses Amazon's own services and doesn't require capital commitments by businesses that want to use it, who can thus determine how much storage they need, and for how long, and budget for it.
Source: The Guardian
