Google LLC has announced general availability of its Archive class cloud storage service, designed for rarely accessed data that needs to be stored for longer than 12 months.

Archive Storage, announced Wednesday, was first launched in preview last year, and becomes the fourth tier of Google Cloud Platform’s storage options, after its Standard, Nearline and Coldline tiers. The various storage options are differentiated by things such as price, performance and frequency of access.

Google said Archive Storage is the best option for companies that need to store data for things such as compliance, media backup and research.

One of the differentiating features of Archive Storage, compared to its competitors’ offerings, is that data can be accessed instantly, with Google claiming “millisecond latency” in a blog post announcing the service.

In contrast, Amazon Web Services Inc.’s comparable Glacier Deep Archive service quotes up to 12 hours for data to be retrieved.

Of course, companies that use Archive Storage won’t want to access any data they store in it very often. That’s because operations cost 10 times the price of its Standard storage tier, while data retrieval is five times more expensive.

Google said data stored in Archive Storage can be accessed using the same application programming interface as its Standard, Coldline and Nearline offerings, which makes it simple to move information among the various tiers. Data is automatically encrypted at rest, and can be protected against deletion through a feature called Bucket Lock, and there is optional geo-redundancy.

The offering is priced at $0.0012 per gigabyte per month for data at rest, with a minimum storage duration of 365 days.

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