AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 341

A company has 700 TB of backup data stored in network attached storage (NAS) in its data center This backup data need to be accessible for infrequent regulatory requests and must be retained 7 years. The company has decided to migrate this backup data from its data center to AWS. The migration must be complete within 1 month. The company has 500 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth on its public internet connection available for data transfer.
What should a solutions architect do to migrate and store the data at the LOWEST cost?

Answer options

• A. Order AWS Snowball devices to transfer the data. Use a lifecycle policy to transition the files to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
• B. Deploy a VPN connection between the data center and Amazon VPC. Use the AWS CLI to copy the data from on premises to Amazon S3 Glacier.
• C. Provision a 500 Mbps AWS Direct Connect connection and transfer the data to Amazon S3. Use a lifecycle policy to transition the files to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
• D. Use AWS DataSync to transfer the data and deploy a DataSync agent on premises. Use the DataSync task to copy files from the on-premises NAS storage to Amazon S3 Glacier.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Transferring 700 TB of data over a 500 Mbps connection would take approximately 130 days, which violates the 1-month migration deadline and rules out network-based transfer options like VPN, DataSync, or Direct Connect. Utilizing AWS Snowball devices allows physical transport of the data to AWS within the required timeframe. Once the data is in AWS, transitioning it to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides the lowest-cost storage class for long-term retention with infrequent access.