Establishing a Secure Backup and Archiving Solution with AWS

Answer - A.

Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup.

Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

With Amazon lifecycle policies you can create transition actions in which you define when objects transition to another Amazon S3 storage class.

For example, you may choose to transition objects to the STANDARD_IA (IA, for infrequent access) storage class 30 days after creation, or archive objects to the GLACIER storage class one year after creation.

Option B is invalid because lifecycle policies are not available for EBS volumes.

Option C is invalid because IAM policies cannot be used to move data to Glacier.

Option D is invalid because lifecycle policies is not used to move data to Redshif.

For more information on S3 lifecycle policies, please visit the url.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle-mgmt.html

To establish a secure backup and archiving solution for a company, using AWS, we need to consider a service that can provide durability, availability, and security for data storage.

Based on the requirements of the question, the documents should be immediately accessible for three months, and available for five years for compliance reasons. The most cost-effective way to meet these requirements is to use Amazon S3 with lifecycle policies to move the data into Glacier for long-term archiving.

Option A is the correct answer. Here's why:

A. Upload data to S3 and use lifecycle policies to move the data into Glacier for long-term archiving.

Amazon S3 is a highly durable and scalable object storage service. We can upload data to S3, and it provides immediate access to the data for the first three months. After that, using lifecycle policies, we can automatically move the data into Amazon Glacier, which is a low-cost, long-term storage service designed for data archiving and backup. Glacier is compliant with various regulatory requirements and provides security features such as encryption and access controls.

B. Upload the data on EBS, use lifecycle policies to move EBS snapshots into S3 and later into Glacier for long-term archiving.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block-level storage service designed for EC2 instances. While it can be used for backup and archiving, it is more suited for block-level storage rather than object-level storage. Using EBS for this use case can be more expensive and less flexible than using S3. Additionally, EBS snapshots can be moved to S3 and Glacier, but it is more suited for backup and recovery rather than long-term archiving.

C. Use Direct Connect to upload data to S3 and use IAM policies to move the data into Glacier for long-term archiving.

AWS Direct Connect is a dedicated network connection between a company's on-premises infrastructure and AWS. While it can be used to upload data to S3, it is not necessary for this use case. IAM policies are used to manage access to AWS services, not to move data between services.

D. Use Storage Gateway to store data to S3 and use lifecycle policies to move the data into Redshift for long-term archiving.

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid storage service that allows on-premises applications to use AWS cloud storage. While it can be used for backup and archiving, it is not necessary for this use case. Redshift is a data warehouse service and not suited for long-term archiving.

In conclusion, option A is the most cost-effective way to establish a secure backup and archiving solution for a company using AWS. It meets the requirements of immediately accessible data for three months and long-term archiving for five years using S3 with lifecycle policies to move the data into Glacier.