Last week, Amazon Web Services announced its Import/Export service would be openly available, in order to facilitate the movement of data to and from the cloud.
The catch: it appears as though the fastest way to transfer large amounts of data is by mailing a storage device to Amazon. As Amazon itself noted when they launched the Import/Export service, “it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection.”
Using the mail to move data in and out of the cloud seems like a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem: infinitely scalable cloud resources mean little when broadband capabilities make it difficult to get information in and out.
What are your thoughts on Amazon’s solution to lengthy upload and download times?
