Migrating Data to AWS — Snowball vs Import Export Service

When organizations shift from a traditional data center to a cloud computing environment part of the migration is moving the organizations data to the could.

The easiest method to move data from the organization’s datacenter to the cloud is with a direct connection or a VPN, but there are times where this is just not feasible.

Why Not Just Send Over The Network?

If the organizations connections to the cloud are heavily utilized there may not be sufficient bandwidth to send data to the cloud. Or the organization may have petabytes of data which will take an excessively long time to be transmitted over a Gigabit or 10 Gigabit connection to AWS. Sometimes there are critical timelines and its simply not possible to wait for file transfers to complete, so AWS has two solutions to expedite the process. These options are the AWS snowball and the import/export service.

AWS Snowball To The Rescue

The AWS Snowball is a rugged computer with substantial storage that can be rented from AWS. When the customer has a lot of data to move to the cloud the customer requests a snowball or multiple snowballs from AWS. AWS then ships the Snowball to the customer. The customer places the Snowball on their network and copies the files they want to move to AWS. To secure the organizations data, the files on the Snowball are encrypted. The organization then ships the Snowball to AWS. When the Snowball is received by AWS, AWS employees move the data from the Snowball to the organization’s cloud computing environment.

The diagram below shows an example of an AWS Snowball.

AWS Import/Export Service

The import-export service is essentially a means to ship data to AWS. Essentially, you copy your data to a hard drive or hard drives. Then the organization ships the hard drives to AWS. Once the hard drives are received by AWS, they move the data from the hard drives to your cloud computing environment.

The diagram below shows how the AWS Import/Export service is used to quickly move large amounts of data to AWS.

Now you know the main methods to migrate data from an organization’s datacenter to the AWS cloud.

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