Likelihood to Recommend Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review The AWS Storage Gateway is well suited if you want a quick way to off load your backups to the cloud to eliminate the need of a offsite storage location for physical tapes. The ROI is quite good from that perspective since you can utilize Glacier storage for the virtual tapes. The AWS Storage Gateway is not well suited if data sets being backed up is very large. The lack of de-duplication will add time to your backup. It will also increase the egress charges
Read full review Pros Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities. Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions. It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world. Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS. Read full review Easy to deploy: Setting the solution up took much less time than anticipated. AWS management Console facilitates monitoring: This allowed us to ditch a home baked solution in lieu this great tool! Secure data transfer: Easily passing our company audits and standards for security. VM integration Read full review Cons Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are Read full review Ease of finding useful helpful tips on using AWS Dumbing down of the technical jargon on the site Short sharp to the point step videos - answering some common questions Remembering not everyone is an IT person - could be more user friendly Read full review Usability It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review Support Rating AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review AWS Storage Gateway is supported by the AWS Support team, they provide excellent support and great SLAs for our needs.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup,
Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review AWS Storage Gateway performance is ever excellent since we deployed it in our company. Downloading this platform and installing the setup is easy as compared to other similar products. Virtual data that we get from our cloud servers [are] good in the enhancement of better planning and safety [compliance]. I have been able to integrate the data from our server to our systems to streamline workflow and boost performance.
Read full review Return on Investment It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost. The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in. If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents. Read full review It has positively affected us for ETL on reports to customers that neither party wants to pay too much for. It has also positively affected us where our backup systems where old and had large maintenance costs. It has some new, net negative impact with slowed down delivery or random slowing incidents. Read full review ScreenShots