AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 723

A pharmaceutical company is developing a new drug. The volume of data that the company generates has grown exponentially over the past few months. The company's researchers regularly require a subset of the entire dataset to be immediately available with minimal lag. However, the entire dataset does not need to be accessed on a daily basis. All the data currently resides in on-premises storage arrays, and the company wants to reduce ongoing capital expenses.

Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Run AWS DataSync as a scheduled cron job to migrate the data to an Amazon S3 bucket on an ongoing basis.
• B. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway with an Amazon S3 bucket as the target storage. Migrate the data to the Storage Gateway appliance.
• C. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway with cached volumes with an Amazon S3 bucket as the target storage. Migrate the data to the Storage Gateway appliance.
• D. Configure an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection from the on-premises environment to AWS. Migrate data to an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway with cached volumes is the ideal solution because it stores the primary dataset in Amazon S3 while retaining a frequently accessed subset of data locally for low-latency access. This effectively minimizes on-premises capital expenditures by offloading bulk storage to the cloud. Other options like DataSync or EFS over VPN do not provide the required local caching mechanism to ensure minimal lag for local researchers.