Amazon S3 is storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the Internet. Nowadays when companies need to collect, store, and analyze their abundant data with the highest level of security, it brings in the complexities to the companies and slow down their innovation and subsequently, their growth.

Security with AWS S3

Not only does AWS S3 give us enormous storage to store as many files as you would require. It does so while keeping the security levels to the maximum.

only the resource owners have access to Amazon S3 resources they create. You can use access control mechanisms such as bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users. You can securely upload or download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol. For extra security one can use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option to encrypt data stored at rest. Various encryption standards include SSE-S3, SSE-C, SSE-KMS.

Utilizing the Automated Security

Amazon Macie allows an organization to monitor the data and the account credentials thereby securing the environment from unwanted malicious activities. Amazon Macie gives you an automated way to discover and classify your business data. It provides controls via templated Lambda functions to revoke access or trigger password reset policies upon the discovery of suspicious behavior or unauthorized data access to entities or third-party applications. When alerts are generated, you can use Amazon Macie for incident response, using Amazon CloudWatch Events to quickly take action and protect your data.

Durability of data

Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Glacier, S3 Standard–IA and S3 One Zone-IA are all capable of providing 99.999999999% availability and accessibility of your data. Which means, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years. In addition, it is all designed to sustain data in the event of an entire S3 Availability Zone loss. Along with that, you get the capability of Versioning, which allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket. older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Depending upon the usage of different files/folders/object Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering creates access tiers to save cost for the customer. One tier is optimized for frequent access and the other lower-cost tier is designed for infrequent access. Hence it brings in the smartness in an S3 storage class for data with unknown access patterns or changing access patterns that are difficult to learn.

Advantages of AWS S3

Amazon S3 has a huge number of benefits that one can jot down for multiple pages, some of them are mentioned below:

  • Durability, Availability, and Scalability
    Amazon S3 is most durable as it works on global cloud infrastructure. The data is transferred within three physical availability zones which are far away from the AWS Region. The S3 is available in most of the places and it offers AWS customer an easier and effective way to design and operate applications and database.
  • Compliance Capability
    S3 supports a plethora of security standards and compliance certifications. This helps customers to satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe. Hence, organization can keep on collecting and making their valuable data and not care for the compliance attached to it.
  • Increased Usage
    AWS S3 allows the user to run the Big data analytics on a particular system without moving it to another analytics system. Amazon Redshift spectrum allows the user to run both the data warehouse and the S3. AWS S3 select helps the user to retrieve the data back which the user is in need of. Amazon Athena provides the user the vast amount of unstructured data to a user familiar with SQL.
  • Easy Management
    As we have seen through-out the years, managing the data can be just as difficult to managing an organization. That’s where Storage administrators comes into the picture, it helps in arranging report and visualize data usage. This will help to monitor the data and reduce cost while improving the services. Amazon S3 along with the AWS Lambda helps customers to log activities, define alerts and many more functions without managing any other infrastructure.
  • Easy data commutation
    Amazon S3 provides multiple options or ways to transfer data into the Amazon S3 via an API which transfers the data through the internet.  AWS snowball provides a petabyte-level data transfer system. AWS Storage gateway provides the on-premises storage gateway which sends the data directly to the cloud from the user premises.

Uses of Amazon S3

AWS S3 has son many uses that different industries use in different manner to achieve their goals. some common ones are stated below:

  • Run Analytics on huge Data
    A large amount of the data which can be of different types can be stored in the S3 bucket and it can be used as a data lake for big data analytics. AWS S3 provides us with many services which help us to manage big Data by reducing cost and increasing the speed of innovation.
  • Backup and recovery
    AWS S3 provides highly durable and secure places for backing up and archiving the data. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier provide four different storage classes. This helps to optimize cost and performance while meeting the Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective.
  • Data Archiving
    AWS S3 and Amazon Glacier help the customer by providing a vast storage facility to keep as much of company data as they want while meet the need of compliance archives as the organizations need fast access to the data.