Disaster Recovery at Petabyte Scale: How an Outdoor Retail Brand Protected 50 Years of Data

An outdoor gear and activewear company that has been helping people explore the world for nearly a century. Known for its innovative designs and portfolio of leading brands, they create performance-driven apparel, footwear, and equipment trusted by outdoor enthusiasts around the globe. Its business spans design and development, global manufacturing partnerships, and distribution through retail, e-commerce, and third-party channels. With over half of its revenue generated in the U.S. and growing international sales, the company is both a heritage brand and a forward-looking leader in a highly competitive market.

The Challenge

Behind every product launch, marketing campaign, and seasonal catalog lies a vast digital archive. For this customer, that archive had grown to more than 1.5 petabytes of media over the course of five decades. Product images, creative assets, and print-ready files were scattered across on-premises systems with no disaster recovery strategy in place.

The stakes were high. A cyberattack, storage failure, or even an accidental deletion could erase decades of irreplaceable content. Losing access to these assets would delay product launches, disrupt campaigns, and create costly setbacks across the business. For a global retailer, even a few days of disruption can translate into millions in lost revenue and eroded customer trust.

This was a data management issue that created a major business continuity challenge, and the leadership team recognized that protecting these assets was essential to safeguarding the company’s brand and future growth.

The Solution

Effectual worked with the customer to design a solution that balanced simplicity, scalability, and financial transparency. The project began with a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis using the AWS Pricing Calculator. By modeling expected growth and usage patterns, the customer gained a clear picture of ongoing costs and could confidently commit to a cloud-based strategy.

The solution was built on three AWS services that worked in concert:

• Amazon S3 became the foundation for durable, secure storage. Buckets were configured with versioning and object lock compliance, creating an immutable record of every asset and ensuring files could not be overwritten, deleted, or corrupted.
• AWS DataSync was implemented to automate the migration of data from on-premises locations to S3. This eliminated manual transfers, accelerated throughput, and allowed IT staff to focus on higher-value tasks rather than managing the movement of files.
• AWS Direct Connect provided a private, high-bandwidth connection between the customer’s environment and AWS. With more than 1.5PB of media to move, a reliable, low-latency transfer path was critical to meeting timelines and avoiding disruptions.

Together, these services created a disaster recovery framework that was both technically robust and easy for the customer’s IT team to operate. What was once a looming risk was replaced with a modern, cloud-native approach to resilience.

Results and Benefits

By migrating 1.5PB of historical and current assets to Amazon S3, the customer transformed the way it safeguards brand-critical content. The project delivered measurable results:

• Resilient disaster recovery: Decades of creative and commercial assets are now protected against loss from cyber threats, accidents, or infrastructure failures.
• Operational efficiency: Automated transfers via DataSync reduced manual oversight, saving IT staff significant time and minimizing human error.
• Cost visibility and control: The upfront TCO analysis provided financial leaders with confidence in the long-term economics of the solution.
• Scalability for growth: With assets securely stored in S3, the company has a foundation to support future expansion without adding infrastructure complexity.

The solution delivers lasting resilience, protecting both brand reputation and revenue continuity. Leaders can now focus on growth and innovation, confident that decades of creative assets remain secure and accessible.