Nearly all enterprises, regardless of industry, have to store files, whether they are backups, media content or specialized vertical application datasets. Managing and scaling on-premises infrastructure to provide online storage and distribution of such backup or content files is often burdensome and costly, requiring expensive hardware refreshes, expansion and software licensing. Such large file data repositories can be siloed in specialized file servers, NAS units or backup systems, limiting access for big data analytics or media processing applications.

AWS Storage Gateway's file interface, or file gateway, offers you a seamless way to connect to the cloud in order to store application data files and backup images as durable objects on Amazon S3 cloud storage. File gateway offers SMB or NFS-based access to data in Amazon S3 with local caching. It can be used for on-premises applications, and for Amazon EC2-resident applications that need file storage in S3 for object based workloads.