AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 289

A company has an on-premises volume backup solution that has reached its end of life. The company wants to use AWS as part of a new backup solution and wants to maintain local access to all the data while it is backed up on AWS. The company wants to ensure that the data backed up on AWS is automatically and securely transferred.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Snowball to migrate data out of the on-premises solution to Amazon S3. Configure on-premises systems to mount the Snowball S3 endpoint to provide local access to the data.
• B. Use AWS Snowball Edge to migrate data out of the on-premises solution to Amazon S3. Use the Snowball Edge file interface to provide on-premises systems with local access to the data.
• C. Use AWS Storage Gateway and configure a cached volume gateway. Run the Storage Gateway software appliance on premises and configure a percentage of data to cache locally. Mount the gateway storage volumes to provide local access to the data.
• D. Use AWS Storage Gateway and configure a stored volume gateway. Run the Storage Gateway software appliance on premises and map the gateway storage volumes to on-premises storage. Mount the gateway storage volumes to provide local access to the data.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway configured as a stored volume gateway is the correct choice because it keeps the entire dataset locally on-premises for low-latency access while asynchronously backing it up to Amazon S3 as EBS snapshots. In contrast, a cached volume gateway only stores a subset of frequently accessed data locally, which fails to meet the requirement of keeping all data local. AWS Snowball and Snowball Edge options are meant for physical data transport and migration, rather than a continuous, automatic backup solution with local volume access.