A company uses a large, growing, and high performance on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instance with an Always On availability group cluster size of 120 TiB. The company uses a third- party backup…

An AWS Direct Connect hosted connection is crucial for ensuring the required 2 Gbps bandwidth and stable, low-latency network connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS, which is essential for sustaining SQL Server Always On asynchronous data replication and minimizing downtime during migration.

An AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection, while providing connectivity, typically operates over the public internet and cannot reliably guarantee the sustained 2 Gbps bandwidth or the consistent low latency required for high-performance Always On replication during a migration of this scale.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is the appropriate tool for migrating large, high-performance SQL Server databases with minimal downtime and data loss, as it supports continuous data replication (Change Data Capture) from the on-premises source to the AWS target.

Deploying an Always On Availability Group on Amazon EC2 is the correct target architecture to allow system-level access, but it is a prerequisite deployment step rather than a direct migration action related to connectivity, migration tool, or access granting.

Since the third-party backup product requires system-level access and will continue to be used, granting this specific access to the product on the Amazon EC2-based SQL Server deployment is a necessary action to meet the company's ongoing operational requirements.

Configuring the third-party backup product is a subsequent operational step after migration; the more fundamental action related to meeting the requirement is granting the necessary system-level access (E) that enables such configuration.