Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that Amazon S3 customers are getting a new feature that improves visibility into object storage, delivering insights that can help them to discover anomalies, identify cost efficiencies and better apply best practices for data protection.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens is described by the company as a “cloud storage analytics solution.” It provides a single view of a company’s object storage usage and activity across hundreds or even thousands of accounts they use.

The service enables companies to drill down to generate insights about their object storage activity at the account, bucket or prefix level. Then it delivers contextual recommendations that can help users reduce their storage costs and better protect their data, according to AWS.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens is designed to be used with Amazon S3, the company’s primary data storage service. It’s used to store and share large data sets among potentially thousands of users in multiple regions of the world.

In a blog post, Amazon Principal Developer Advocate Martin Beeby said S3 Storage Lens is meant to assist customers whose reliance on Amazon S3 grows over time.

“When starting out in the cloud, a customer’s storage requirements might consist of a handful of S3 buckets, but as they grow, migrate more applications and realize the power of the cloud, things can become more complicated,” he said.

Eventually, customers reach a point where they have tens or even hundreds of S3 storage accounts, with multiple buckets across different geographic regions. That’s when managing things becomes a headache, and it becomes difficult to optimize things to improve costs and security posture, Beeby said.

The new feature remedies this with interactive dashboards that aggregate storage data across a user’s entire organization. It provides more than 30 metrics on usage and activity for every account. With those metrics, it’s possible to visualize storage usage and trends and take immediate actions based on the contextual recommendations it provides.

“All of this data is accessible in the S3 Management Console or as raw data in an S3 bucket,” Beeby added.

Feedback from early adopters has been positive. Dan Soble, vice president of technical operations at Veeva Inc., which provides cloud services for the global life sciences industry, said his company was saving thousands of dollars a month by optimizing its S3 object storage.

“S3 Storage Lens is very simple to setup and configure,” he said. “We received good insights into our S3 usage, which allowed us to put into action plans to optimize costs in S3.”

Amazon S3 Storage Lens is available now in all commercial AWS regions.

Image: AWS