Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Glacier service, a cloud storage services which can provide secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup at lower cost.

The new storage application suitable for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference and enables customers to store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month.

Amazon Glacier will enable user to pay only for what is used and scale the usage up or down as needed, while AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well.

It also supports secure transfer of user data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

Users can now control access to their data using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM enables organisations to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account and to set resource-based access policies.

Amazon Glacier is claimed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive and synchronously store user data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives.

The new service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility, performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.

In addition, the new release also provides an option for the users to choose where the data to be stored in the Amazon Glacier Region based on their regulatory, throughput and geographic redundancy criteria.

Amazon Glacier allows users to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS and makes retaining data for long periods.

Users can now use AWS Import/Export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into Amazon Glacier using portable storage devices for transport.

The company said, it only takes a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to set up Amazon Glacier and then user can upload any amount of data.

AWS Storage Services vice president Alyssa Henry said: "Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well."