Amazon Web Services hosts some of the world’s most valuable data for commercial enterprises in the cloud, but faced challenges it probably never faced before when Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year. AWS was reportedly required to protect critical government data hosted in Ukraine and bring all state-provided digital services back online. business insider.
Moving petabytes of critical data using secure internet channels was not particularly easy as Ukraine was heavily bombed and web usage increased significantly. To capture and store a physical copy of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and economic information data, AWS shipped a custom-built Snowball Edge solid-state drive to Poland and brought it to Ukraine.
Unfortunately, AWS does not show the Snowball Edge suitcase-sized SSD used to physically transfer data from Ukraine to a safe location.A Snowball Edge machine in your data center (opens in new tab) Provides up to 80 TB of usable storage space. We surmise that these are very high storage density all-flash arrays designed to be very reliable.
AWS currently serves 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, the largest distance learning K-12 school (serving hundreds of thousands of displaced children), and dozens of different private companies. We host over 10PB (petabytes) of critical data from There are currently 61 government data migrations to AWS, with more to come.
PrivatBank, the country’s largest bank, migrated 270 applications and 4PB of client data on 3,500 servers in Ukraine to AWS. Interestingly, PrivatBank plans to continue using his AWS infrastructure after the war is over. This is a departure from the bank’s usual approach of using on-premises machines to run mission-critical software.
The digitization of these data and services will ensure the continuity of the Ukrainian state and ensure that people will always have access to the information they need. This data is important today as students want to continue their education elsewhere, but it will also be important tomorrow as the country rebuilds. “Government in a Box” servers and storage will allow Ukraine to avoid the turmoil associated with the war and post-war period, which is difficult to overstate.
Liam Maxwell, Director of the Government Transformation Team for AWS Public Sector Business and Volunteer for AWS Initiatives, said: Aid Ukraine. “But moving to cloud safety and security gives governments and their citizen services the upper hand.”
