The two selected cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which are in the top 5 largest providers in the United States. AWS boasts over 1 million active enterprise customers, with the majority made up by small and mid-sized businesses, while Azure does not public exact numbers, but reportedly serves a significant portion of Fortune 500 companies.
The AWS pricing structure is based on optimization and savings. Businesses can pay for only what they use, so its adaptable from month to month, and can reserve capacity, ahead of time, usually saving more money for larger payments. Overall, AWS offers volume-based discounts and cost optimization. Out of more than 191 services that AWS offers, it has specific cloud migration services which allow to freely move workload from other public clouds or hosting facility as well as database migration services to migrate data to and from widely used databases (AWS, 2021). Meanwhile, Azure focuses strongly on by-product-based pricing which optimizes costs by offering best-practice recommendations and benefit programs. It offers calculators and transparent pricing lists ahead of time. Similarly, it offers a migration service with guidance and a central dashboard to migrate workloads to the cloud, with a unique differentiation of a comprehensive approach for multiple scenarios (Microsoft Azure, 2021).
In regards to backup, AWS provides each used with Amazon Workspaces dashboard. Each customer has their designs and services that are planned for along with DR deployment models which plans for various scenarios such as natural disaster. Furthermore, the AWS infrastructure is split into regions and availability zone. Deploying Amazon Workspaces is associated with a virtual private cloud, but all AWS directory services require two subnets to operate, each placed in a different zone/region. For each workspace deployed, there are two EBS volumes, which are highly available and reliable. The EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in the availability zone which prevents loss of data from failure of a single component. Both the system and user EBS are automatically snapshotted every 12 hours, replicated across 3 availability zones and can serve as a rollback or backup to serve in cases of DR or BC (Persson, 2019).
Meanwhile, Azure has two components in its policy which are schedule and retention. The user can define their policies-based type of data, RTO/RPO requirements and regulatory compliance. Businesses can optimize backup policy based on their needs, lasting from years or months to even a few minutes. Azure stores back up in two types of vaults, the recover services vaults and the back-up ones. The cline can specify how data in the vault is replicated, including locally, geo, and zone redundant storage, once again depending on protections needed and types of data. Azure has a number of backup agents for various devices. Recovery services always uses geo-redundant storage (Microsoft, 2019).
References
AWS. (2021). Explore our solutions. Amazon. Web.
Microsoft. (2019). Azure Backup architecture and components. Microsoft.
Microsoft Azure. (2021). Overview. Microsoft. Web.
Persson, P. (2019). Business continuity and disaster recovery with Amazon WorkSpaces. AWS.