In most situations, being cheap and slow is a bad thing, but for Amazon’s new AWS Glacier service, being affordable and slow moving may be exactly what some businesses have been wanting. AWS Glacier provides slow moving storage and operates on the premise that businesses sometimes need to store data that does not need to be accessed very often.

According to Amazon, “you need Glacier”. The company is betting on the likelihood that many businesses are using traditional long-term storage devices, such as tape backups or optical discs and that those methods are complicated and expensive. Glacier, on the other hand, is priced as low as $0.01 per gigabyte, per month. Customers simply create vaults and start uploading data into what Amazon calls an archive. The data is then encrypted using AES-256 and stored for as long as the user needs it.

Organizations like New York Public Radio plan to keep their data archived for years, perhaps even centuries, and AWS Glacier is exactly what they were hoping to find. NYPR CTO Steve Shultis said of Glacier, “Storing these core assets on traditional media such as local disk and off-site tape exposes us to corruption and even outright-loss of data. We are excited to move our archives to Amazon Glacier, which will be a better long-term solution.”

Is there a downside? There is possibly a logistical downside. If, for example, you run a low-budget non-profit library and need to archive several terabytes of data, uploading all of your data to Amazon is probably not an option, simply from a bandwidth/cost perspective. The other option is to mail your tapes or drives to Amazon, incurring additional costs.

For some, however, that inconvenience might still be worth it in order to have a secure offsite archive of their data. Amazon is also hoping it will be more affordable and more appealing than the alternatives and S3 competitors like SpiderOak. If Amazon can keep the price of AWS Glacier low and be as reliable as it claims, it might very well accomplish those goals.