Amazon becomes enterprise cloud backup provider

Amazon has turned its attention to the enterprise market with its latest offering, which allows firms to use its cloud storage facilities for backup purposes.

The new product, called AWS Storage Gateway, enables enterprises to back up point-in-time snapshots of on-premises application data to the Amazon cloud for future recovery.

"In the event you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery purposes, or if you want to leverage Amazon EC2's on-demand compute capacity for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run your normal workloads, you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to mirror your on-premises data to Amazon EC2 instances," said the firm, describing its new service.

As many firms are dubious about storing sensitive application data in the cloud, Amazon is keen to emphasise the security measures it has implemented.

The gateway transfers data to the cloud over SSL (Secure Socket Layer), a cryptographic protocol, to protect the information in transit.

Amazon then stores the data in its cloud using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

Resiliency is supplied by Amazon S3, which makes the data less susceptible to datacentre failures or disasters by storing it in multiple locations, it said.

"Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, redundantly storing your data on multiple devices across multiple facilities in a region," said the firm.

The service is currently being offered as a 60-day free trial, with a subsequent cost of £79.70 per month for the gateway, with additional fees levied depending on volumes of data transferred.