Question

A logistics company stores 500 TB of shipment scan images in a Cloud Storage bucket. Analysis shows that images are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, occasionally between 30 and 90 days, and essentially never after 1 year (though they must be retained for 7 years for compliance). The architect wants to minimize storage cost while ensuring the rare retrievals within the first year remain reasonably quick and no manual intervention is required. What should the architect configure?

Accepted Answer

Create an Object Lifecycle Management policy that transitions objects from Standard to Nearline at 30 days, to Coldline at 90 days, and to Archive at 365 days.

Answer

Store all objects in Standard storage and manually move them to Archive after 1 year using a scheduled Cloud Function.

Answer

Store all objects in Archive storage from the start, since most data is rarely accessed over the 7-year period.

Answer

Enable Autoclass on a Nearline bucket and set a retention policy of 7 years to satisfy compliance.