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Cloud storage has several use cases in application management, data management, and business continuity. Lets consider some examples below.

Traditional on-premises storage solutions can be inconsistent in their cost, performance, and scalability especially over time. Analytics demand large-scale, affordable, highly available, and secure storage pools that are commonly referred to as data lakes.

Data lakes built on object storage keep information in its native form and include rich metadata that allows selective extraction and use for analysis. Cloud-based data lakes can sit at the center of multiple kinds of data warehousing and processing, as well as big data and analytical engines, to help you accomplish your next project in less time and with more targeted relevance.

Backup and disaster recovery are critical for data protection and accessibility, but keeping up with increasing capacity requirements can be a constant challenge. Cloud storage brings low cost, high durability, and extreme scale to data backup and recovery solutions. Embedded data management policies can automatically migrate data to lower-cost storage based on frequency or timing settings, and archival vaults can be created to help comply with legal or regulatory requirements. These benefits allow for tremendous scale possibilities within industries such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and media and entertainment that produce high volumes of unstructured data with long-term retention needs.

Software test and development environments often require separate, independent, and duplicate storage environments to be built out, managed, and decommissioned. In addition to the time required, the up-front capital costs required can be extensive.

Many of the largest and most valuable companies in the world create applications in record time by using the flexibility, performance, and low cost of cloud storage. Even the simplest static websites can be improved at low cost. IT professionals and developers are turning to pay-as-you-go storage options that remove management and scale headaches.

The availability, durability, and low cloud storage costs can be very compelling. On the other hand, IT personnel working with storage, backup, networking, security, and compliance administrators might have concerns about the realities of transferring large amounts of data to the cloud. For some, getting data into the cloud can be a challenge. Hybrid, edge, and data movement services meet you where you are in the physical world to help ease your data transfer to the cloud.

Storing sensitive data in the cloud can raise concerns about regulation and compliance, especially if this data is currently stored in compliant storage systems. Cloud data compliance controls are designed to ensure that you can deploy and enforce comprehensive compliance controls on your data, helping you satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe. Often through a shared responsibility model, cloud vendors allow customers to manage risk effectively and efficiently in the IT environment, and provide assurance of effective risk management through compliance with established, widely recognized frameworks and programs.

Cloud-native applications use technologies like containerization and serverless to meet customer expectations in a fast-paced and flexible manner. These applications are typically made of small, loosely coupled, independent components called microservices that communicate internally by sharing data or state. Cloud storage services provide data management for such applications and provide solutions to ongoing data storage challenges in the cloud environment.

Enterprises today face significant challenges with exponential data growth. Machine learning (ML) and analytics give data more uses than ever before. Regulatory compliance requires long retention periods. Customers need to replace on-premises tape and disk archive infrastructure with solutions that provide enhanced data durability, immediate retrieval times, better security and compliance, and greater data accessibility for advanced analytics and business intelligence.

Many organizations want to take advantage of the benefits of cloud storage, but have applications running on premises that require low-latency access to their data, or need rapid data transfer to the cloud. Hybrid cloud storage architectures connect your on-premises applications and systems to cloud storage to help you reduce costs, minimize management burden, and innovate with your data.

Because block storage has high performance and is readily updatable, many organizations use it for transactional databases. With its limited metadata, block storage is able to deliver the ultra-low latency required for high-performance workloads and latency sensitive applications like databases.

Block storage allows developers to set up a robust, scalable, and highly efficient transactional database. As each block is a self-contained unit, the database performs optimally, even when the stored data grows.

With cloud storage, you can process, store, and analyze data close to your applications and then copy data to the cloud for further analysis. With cloud storage, you can store data efficiently and cost-effectively while supporting ML, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced analytics to gain insights and innovate for your business.

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What is Cloud Storage? - Cloud Storage - AWS