A financial Organization has an on-premises Data Center that holds large volumes of customers` financial transaction data on its legacy mainframe systems. While accessing transaction data, they have implemented a caching solution in the AWS cloud that will hold the customer’s financial data due to performance issues. The transaction data is extremely confidential & is heavy in bandwidth while transferring to the cloud. What connectivity would you recommend for this data transfer? Select the best answer.

Answer options:

A.Direct Connect with a VPN connection
B.Virtual Private Network (VPN)
C.AWS Storage Gateway
D.AWS Snowball

Answer: A
Option A is CORRECT since Direct Connect provides a dedicated connection to the on-premises data Center bypassing the internet providing a more secure data transfer mechanism. It also allows you to control the bandwidth to transfer massive amounts of data with the Direct Connect partner which is a prime requirement. VPN connection ensures that the connection is secure.
Option B is incorrect. Bandwidth is important for the connection. So Direct Connect is required.
Option C is incorrect. AWS Storage Gateway is a means that provides a Backup & Recovery option for data to the AWS cloud that is stored within the on-premises Data Center. Primarily used with S3, the transfer still happens through the internet after encryption. Also since the data is backed up asynchronously, the cache may be Eventually Consistent resulting in stale data being retrieved from the cache.
Option D is incorrect. Snowball is an offline data transfer mechanism used when there is a huge amount of data (100TB) that needs to be transferred to the cloud. Moving them over a WAN can take years & can be impractical at times. A physical appliance is shipped to the on-premise Data Center which can be hooked to a network for transferring data. Once done, it is shipped back to the Cloud Data Center, where it can be copied to storage devices like S3. Since our scenario requires real-time data availability between the On-Premise Data Center & AWS Cloud, it may not suffice the requirements.
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/directconnect/latest/UserGuide/Welcome.html