AWS starts offering $2,000 in credits for disaster recovery preparation

Cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer $2,000 in cloud credits to help state and local governments, community organisations and educational institutions to better prepare for natural and man-made disasters that could affect these organisations' ability to run critical IT systems. 

Called Project Resilience, the new service is aimed at disaster recovery and offers cloud credits to save costs after enterprises and organisations put in a request, AWS said in a blog post. 

Disaster recovery is an area of security planning that aims to protect an organization from the effects of significant negative events. It allows an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster.

While new customers can sign up and offset costs incurred by strong critical datasets in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), existing customers can offset costs incurred by engaging CloudEndure and AWS Disaster Response services. 

AWS has been rapidly expanding its services and business globally. Last year, the company launched a variety of new services for compute, storage and other services such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and internet of things.

The company has also been increasing its efforts in India and the Asia Pacific region. In February, the company added two new edge locations in India at Hyderabad and New Delhi.

An edge location is where end users access services located at AWS, the cloud computing division of US-headquartered Amazon. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end users to reduce latency.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network offered by Amazon Web Services.  

In May, the company opened up its third availability zone in India and in an interview with TechCircle, Craig Stires, AWS’ Asia Pacific head of artificial intelligence, analytics and big data, said that the company was also recruiting rapidly in India and the three other markets in Asia Pacific region owing to the demand of emerging technology-led services.