AWS ‘Protecting And Preserving’ Ukraine’s Data And Culture

During the keynote presentation at AWS re:Inforce, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt explained how AWS immediately began helping Ukraine on Day 1 of Russia’s invasion of the country.

“On February 24, the date of the invasion, AWS met with Ukrainian government. The discussion focused on bringing our AWS Snowball devices, which is our secure edge computing devices, into Ukraine to help secure, store, and transfer data to the cloud,” said Schmidt.

“A lot of people wonder why that was such a big focus. It’s because a lot of the Russian intent was not only an acquisition of territory, but erasure of Ukrainian identity and culture. And that’s something that we didn’t think was something that should be stood for,” he said. “So two days later, the Snowballs we sent reach their destinations in Ukraine.”

AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport service that uses secure devices to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud.

Snowball devices became critical in “protecting and preserving Ukraine’s data, and thus, the history of their culture,” Schmidt said.

AWS has helped migrate data from 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, and the country’s largest remote school. The leading cloud provider also helped 61 government data migration to AWS, with more on the way.

“There are moments in history where you have to roll up your sleeves and do the right thing,” said Schmidt. “For us, this is one of those moments and I’m really proud of the way the team has responded and will continue to respond.”