Amazon S3 Glacier, which is also known as Amazon Glacier is considered one of the most durable, secure and cost-effective storage classes for long term data backup and archiving. S3 Glacier is one of the storage classes within the multiple storage options available in Amazon S3.
With S3 Glacier, the customers can reliably store large and small amounts of data. There is no limit for the data users store and also the data is secured and can access easily. The data is protected by the methods of redundantly storing it on different devices using multiple facilities. Also, AWS Glacier is enclosed with a data integrity check, which regularly monitors the data in the Glacier.
S3 Glacier provides data access to the users who have AWS access and it is very well secured. It will automatically encrypt the data with 256- bit advanced encryption standards. The data retrieval may take up to 3 to 4 hours. The users can store the data with the benefit of the storage location in which they can choose the location which is most suitable for the regulatory and business criteria.
We have 3 options available to retrieve the data for users
- Bulk retrievals, which is used for recovering large amounts of data within a time of 5 to 12 hour window. This is considered as the lowest option.
- Standard retrievals, which will take 3 to 5 hours to recover the data stored.
- Expedited retrievals in which it can retrieve the data within 5 minutes. It is the most commonly used option and is designed for users that may have the necessity of the stored data at any time.
Since S3 Glacier is long term storage, the users can retain the data for years. This will mainly help the organization in which they may need to refer to a set of data within twice or once in a year and also for the data backup options as well.
S3 Glacier is used in different scenarios and fields, such as,
- Regulatory or compliance archiving in which the glacier enable the industrial and other financial services to keep the records over the long time periods
- Healthcare archival data, which can help the hospitals and other health type organizations to meet the regulatory requirements by achieving the patients data records securely and lower costs.
- Digital preservation, in which it will be helpful for government agencies or libraries for preserving the data digitally.
- Media asset storage, Glacier provides options to store huge media files with low cost options such as videos which will take up a lots of space when stored overtime.
Amazon Glacier stores the data in vaults and archives, in which an archive is considered as a block of data that consists of aggregated data or a single file in the form of a ZIP file or Tape archive. The range of archives is from 1 byte to 40 Terabytes(TB). Also, there are no restrictions for the users in storing the data and also the amount of archives a user can store in the Glacier.
The users can also group, archives together to a vault, which helps in organizing the data. We can create up to 1000 vaults and configure them within the AWS console. A user can select the host, vault for each archive and can manage the access to that vault via AWS. The access to each vault is configured with the help of the administrator in a resource-based manner and who can access the specific archives. Users can implement an access policy to vaults as well and also a vault lock helps in compliance for each lock. Once the lock is locked, the S3 Glacier will apply preset configurations to make sure it meets the compliance standard.
Main advantages of Amazon Glacier
- Cost-effective
- Durability
- Scalability
- Security
- Multiple data retrieval options
- Maintain Archival database
- Globally accessible
- Quick retrievals
