Enterprises today face significant challenges with exponential data growth. Machine learning and analytics give data more value than ever before. Regulatory compliance requires long retention periods. Customers want to replace on-premises tape and disk archive infrastructure with solutions that provide enhanced data durability, faster retrieval times, better security and compliance, and greater data accessibility for advanced analytics and business intelligence.
AWS offers a comprehensive set of cloud storage services for long term retention, compliance, and digital preservation. AWS storage solutions for data archiving provide unlimited scale, 99.999999999% durability, data reliability, and highest standards of data security, all with lower costs and faster access times than on-premises tape storage.
Benefits of archiving to AWS
Lowest cost cloud storage
AWS archival storage solutions start at about $1 per terabyte per month, a cost lower than most customers' on-premises tape infrastructure.
Meet compliance requirements
To aid your compliance efforts, AWS regularly achieves third-party validation for thousands of global compliance requirements that we continually monitor to help you meet security and compliance standards for finance, retail, healthcare, government, and beyond.
Business agility
Quickly move data from archival to production when needed and extract insights by easily accessing adjacent AWS services. Customers can rapidly or gradually expand cloud workflows, or quickly deploy new business models that leverage the asset archive.
Zero hardware to manage
Simplify data archiving and eliminate operational complexities of managing on-premises tape libraries or offsite vaulting services by seamlessly replacing tape infrastructure without changing your existing backup or archiving workflows.
Data protection and data integrity
Data stored on AWS archival storage solutions is highly available, 99.999999999% durable, and highly protected against degradation or corruption throughout the multi-decade retention periods. Data stored on AWS archival storage solutions can be configured to be immutable, ensuring an additional layer of data-protection by preventing malicious or accidental deletion or modification of records even where access credentials are granted.
Unlimited scale with pay-as-you-go pricing
Seamlessly meet unpredictable capacity demands driven by exponential growth of data and pay only for what you use without making large upfront capital investments.
Use cases

Compliance Archival
Heavily regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, and Public Sector organizations require customers to retain data for long periods of time for business compliance and regulatory purposes. AWS supports more security standards and compliance certifications than any other offering, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171, helping satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.

Media Asset Preservation
Customers can store infrequently accessed digital media assets in highly durable and massively scalable storage solutions at very low costs. They can easily move data from archival to distribution when needed, and extract insights by easily accessing adjacent AWS services such as AWS Elemental Media Services, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, and Amazon Rekognition, to maximize the value of data and generate top line value.

Enterprise Backups
Customers can significantly reduce the cost of their offsite backups by migrating off of tape libraries and storage appliances, moving data into the AWS Cloud. AWS archive solutions have no upfront costs, eliminate maintenance costs, and provide significantly faster access when archived data is needed.

Disaster Recovery
Customer can replicate their coldest data to a secondary region at a very low cost with just the click of a button using AWS archival storage solutions and meet Disaster Recovery needs. AWS archival solutions make it easy for organizations to meet their offsite data storage needs with unmatched durability and resilience.
Customers

"We identified archive and backup storage as key candidates to migrate offsite in an attempt to reduce the time we spend managing storage infrastructure. S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides us with near limitless secure and durable capacity at a cost so low that we no longer need to consider deleting critical data."
Vodacom
Partner with an AWS Storage expert
AWS Partner Network (APN) partners offer solutions that leverage AWS archival storage services, providing a durable and cost-efficient storage target for long-term data retention. APN partner solutions enable organizations to harness the benefits of cloud economics while still maintaining their existing investments. Deployment options range from purpose-built appliances to software-defined solutions.
The AWS Partner Network (APN) Competency Program is designed to provide AWS Customers with certified APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success in specialized solutions areas. Partners who’ve attained an APN Competency offer a variety of services, software, and solutions on the AWS Cloud.
Learn how APN Storage Competency Partners can support you with your data archiving needs »
Related AWS Services
Additional resources
Blogs
» How to Easily Replace Physical Tape-based Backups with Tape Gateway
» Protect your file and backup archives using AWS DataSync and Amazon S3 Glacier
» Automate restore of archived objects through AWS Storage Gateway
» Data Protection for Your Cloud Journey with NetBackup 8.2 and AWS
» Storing data with partner backup solutions and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive