Amazon helped rescue the Ukrainian government and economy using suitcase-sized hard drives brought in over the Polish border: 'You can't take out the cloud with a cruise missile'

According to a statement by the company, Amazon has become an unlikely hero to the Ukrainian people, donating medical supplies, food, toys, and a $75 million investment in developing cloud-based backups of essential government data.

Amazon helped back up critical infrastructure and economic information when it used suitcase-sized solid-state hard drives to deliver to Ukraine.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, said that this is the most technologically advanced war in human history.

More than 10 million gigabytes of Ukrainian government and economic data has been saved so far, including data from 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, and dozens of other private sector companies.

The director of government transformation at Amazon met with the Ukrainian ambassador to discuss how the company could help the country. They came up with a plan to save the data.

According to The Los Angeles Times, several East Asian countries have inquired about out-of-the-country backups of their government's data, since it is unclear if Amazon has assisted other countries with such data transfers before.

Fedorov and Maxwell signed a memo agreeing to continue the partnership.

Fedorov said at the signing that "AWS made one of the biggest contributions to Ukraine's victory by giving the Ukrainian government access and resources for migration to the cloud and securing critical information."

The Ukrainian peace prize was given to Amazon in July for helping the country back up essential files to the cloud. While much of the data is transferred to the cloud through secure networks, the Snowball Edge units, still loaded with terabytes of critical information, are shipped back to Amazon for safekeeping.

The Los Angeles Times reported that it was a tense moment. Government is in a box.

Critical information regarding Ukraine's economy, tax and banking systems, and property records are protected from theft and intentional damage due to the safe storage and uploading of valuable drives.

According to The Los Angeles Times, "You can't take out the clouds with a missile."

FedEx, The Clorox Company, and Microsoft are some of the companies that have assisted the war effort in Ukraine. More than 50 companies have followed suit, according to the Boston College Center.

Representatives for Amazon and Zelenskyy did not respond to Insider's questions.