Amazon Web Services has extended its Cloud-storage offerings today with the launch of a new product: Amazon Glacier is described as a “secure, reliable and extremely low cost storage solution” designed for data archiving and backup.

The e-tailer is pitching it for use-cases where the data is infrequently accessed, such as media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. The latter is something where due to legal compliance, there a massive market and it’s not hard to see how Glazier could appeal to SMEs wishing to reduce the cost of meeting those requirements. Typically, says Amazon, companies currently rely on in-house legacy tape systems for this type of archiving.

To that end, Amazon claims that Amazon Glacier offers “significant savings” compared to on-premise solutions, costs start from as little as $0.01/GB/month.

In a statement, Alyssa Henry, Vice President of AWS Storage Services, pushes the case for using Glacier, echoing the promise of the Cloud in general. “Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well.”

Amazon Glacier is available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) regions.