A company hosts a VPN in an on-premises data center. Employees currently connect to the VPN to access files in their Windows home directories. Recently, there has been a large growth in the number…

AWS Storage Gateway Volume Gateway primarily extends on-premises storage to AWS or provides cloud-backed volumes on-premises, and it doesn't directly shift the primary access point or significantly reduce the on-premises network burden for remote users accessing home directories as effectively as a direct cloud file system like FSx.

Migrating Windows home directories to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully managed, scalable, and highly available file system natively compatible with Windows clients and Active Directory. This moves the file access point away from the on-premises data center, significantly reducing its bandwidth usage for file access and addressing workforce growth with reduced operational overhead.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is a high-performance file system optimized for compute-intensive workloads and high-performance computing (HPC), making it an unsuitable and overly complex solution for general Windows home directories.

Migrating remote users to AWS Client VPN offloads the demand from the congested on-premises VPN. AWS Client VPN is a fully managed, elastic, and highly available VPN service that allows remote users to securely access resources in AWS (like FSx for Windows File Server) and, if needed, on-premises resources, supporting growth and reducing operational overhead.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection to AWS, which increases available bandwidth between on-premises and AWS, but it does not inherently reduce the bandwidth usage into the *on-premises data center* from remote users nor does it provide a direct solution for offloading the VPN for the remote workforce.