In this lecture, let's dive a bit deeper into our option for managing and storing data to and from the cloud. In most corporate environments, cloud computing is a complement to the already existing data center and not a replacement to it. This creates some interesting scenarios involving cloud storage. Let's go ahead and discuss some of these use cases. Disaster recovery. This is one of the most popular use cases for cloud storage to be able to provide business continuity in the event of a disaster, such as data center fire, a weather event, or electrical grid failure. In this particular case, performance is not critical, and quite often cost isn't either since this is a critical functionality. However, durability is very important, so that's why storage options such as S3 is a very popular choice. S3 can help keep your data safe while keeping costs relatively low. In the event of a disaster, backups can be retrieved from a secondary location or cloud region. Servers and databases can be restored and operations resumed. There are plenty of third-party tools that can assist with backups to S3 and make it seamless from your on-prem environment for both backing up and restoring purposes. Data replication.

There are times when data is needed in the cloud for safekeeping but also, it needs to be consumed in the local data center in real time. In this case, you can set up a catching layer that can assist with this. This way you don't have to plan a strategy to decide which data to keep in the cloud and which needs to stay on-premises. This is best illustrated with this diagram. In this diagram, you can see storage gateway acting as a local catch between the on-prem network and the cloud. You don't have to worry about data transmission, you just use your files and let the appliance, virtual or physical, handle the caching for you. The opposite is also true. If you need to do large-scale processing of your data, you can do this in the cloud using auto scaling and using the cloud copy of your data. There's no need to traverse the network back to your on-prem storage. Storage Gateway provides the best of both worlds in this case. Use cases for this type of architecture include migrations, that is, replacing local machines with cloud ones while keeping the same data. Modernizations: This is similar to migrations but you're simply doing this to gain access to better performance or newer, more secure version of your operating system or simply continuous innovation, which is just taking advantage of cloud services such as data analytics or machine learning services to improve your business. Data migration is probably the second most popular use case for cloud storage right after backups and disaster recovery.

In this case, you're moving data to the cloud on a permanent basis, that is, you're decommissioning the local copy and moving both data and compute to the cloud. A tool such as AWS Snowball can certainly assist in this initial transfer of data, if we're talking about many gigabytes or terabytes of data. Yes, this is a physical transport mechanism for your data but if the alternative is to transfer the data bit by bit over the wire, it may take a while. So, a little kick star certainly helps. For smallest transfers, however, a Storage Gateway virtual appliance can certainly do the job in real-time. AWS offers specific migration tools such as CloudEndure, also called AWS Migration Service that can move your data snapshots and machine images to S3 storage and keep them at the ready to be restored in the cloud. Data processing. Even while talking about storage, it's hard to ignore the fact that the cloud offers infinitely vast amounts of computing power. This much computing power can come in handy when you need fast results for computations that run on your data, your logs or any other form of data that you collect for your business.

When you set up a cluster, locally or otherwise, you can provide this compute cluster with fast, cost-effective access to your data. EFS, Elastic File Storage, comes to mind in this case because it's a service that you can use to attach it as a Network File Share or NFS to your instances. And yes, EFS can be used locally too. So, if you already own the computing power that you require, you can attach any EFS volume to it and process your cloud data using your hybrid environment.