There are 2 customer segments 1) Enterprise - companies that want to back up their data for disaster recovery purposes and such. 2) Consumers - who want to back up their personal content (photos, docs, files etc) so that they can save it Assuming the 2) is the discussion item. We can look at this very simply along 3 dimensions 1) Is this good for the user? Backup is fairly challenged, the key customer needs are a) Have a single place where all content can be uploaded. Today its split across multiple silos. b) Have a great experience so that backing up is smooth seamless, fast and reliable. c) Competitive pricing There are a large number of players but except for a few (Perhaps Dropbox) there is still a lot left to be desired along these 3 dimensions. 2) Can it be good for Amazon? The willingness to pay for securing data (photos, files) etc is fairly high. Losing this data can have huge impact and customers who care about it are willing to pay. Need to look at the customer segments carefully but power users are likely willing to pay significantly to safeguard their data. This could be a reasonably good business model. We can do some back of the envelope estimation on the amount of data that would need to be backed up by customers to guage the size of the market. 3) Does Amazon have the capabilities and motivation to solve this problem? With AWS and the massive amount of storage processing the company does, this seems like a straightforward use case to amortize existing investments. Furthermore, given the stickiness of backup (you have the customer for life) this can have a very nice tie in with Amazon prime.