I´ve read a lot and heard about Amazon S3 and SharePoint Online competition. Face to face, many companies think one is the best than the other. Even i had to listen a comment from a Microsoft guy saying clearly and loudly, SharePoint was quite better solution than Amazon S3.

To be honest, it depends on what kind of scenario are you figuring out. Each company has an explicit need that use to fit with one or the other.

Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for an specific region as this solution is global, for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, static websites, backup and restore or even archive data, enterprise applications, store IoT logs, and big data.

But what is an object storage?

An object storage is stored in a “flat” address space. Each stored object has a unique identifier and a metadata link that makes it easy to find among thousands of other objects. There is no hierarchy with several folders at all.

This approach improves latency, performance and solve scenarios with data such as x-ray images of patients in a hospital or TIFF files used for maps in a graphic Design Studio.

Amazon S3 Drivers

Drivers are the size for that data, format of files, store such data for a long time, latency to access that data and throughput within a time window to get all the information quickly as possible.

So when should i use Amazon S3?

S3 is global and has Edge Locations which are endpoints in several countries caching content. There are several flavours from S3 Standard to S3 Glacier deep archive depending on your company policies, performance and latency needed, resilience, etc.

Amazon S3 is very flexible as you can even use features such as:

• Life cycle Management
• Versioning
• Encryption
• Protect your buckets (where you classify your data) with ACL and compliance policies

Tu sum up, Amazon S3 covers lot of customers scenarios. Most very critical in terms of latency, or performance. It is a global solution to work with. Even you can pay a little bit more for Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration which you can enable for a bucket when needed,and it speeds up data exchange with this bucket up to 6 times.

In the coming post, i am going to deep dive on Sharepoint Online and best scenarios for this Microsoft cloud solution.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you soon.