Disclaimer: AWS employee, don't work on any of the Snow products
My guess is for situations where you don't have a decent internet connection. Like some remote research base way out in the middle of nowhere. The other major application I can think of is for transferring data to air-gapped networks. You could use Snowball for this also, but that would be overkill in a lot of cases. I think for air-gapped networks this is meant to fill in the niche between a USB drive and something like Snowball.
EDIT: expanding on that off the top of my head I can think of a couple other applications. If you're using long range drones with lots of sensors (think RQ-4 global hawk, but also weather monitoring and the like) you're generating way more data than you could stream over a satellite uplink. So you could put a snowcone (or maybe several) inside the drone and use them for storage of all that raw data. On landing you can remove the snowcone(s) and ship it off to Amazon and all that raw data is available on S3 the next day. There's a bunch of other defense-type applications. Embassies could transfer these in diplomatic pouches for top secret information. In fact, if you wanted to be particularly secure but wanted lower latency, you could use the snowball to transfer a bunch of random bytes to use as a one time pad, which the embassy or intelligence center could use on demand as it transfers data back.
My guess is for situations where you don't have a decent internet connection. Like some remote research base way out in the middle of nowhere. The other major application I can think of is for transferring data to air-gapped networks. You could use Snowball for this also, but that would be overkill in a lot of cases. I think for air-gapped networks this is meant to fill in the niche between a USB drive and something like Snowball.
EDIT: expanding on that off the top of my head I can think of a couple other applications. If you're using long range drones with lots of sensors (think RQ-4 global hawk, but also weather monitoring and the like) you're generating way more data than you could stream over a satellite uplink. So you could put a snowcone (or maybe several) inside the drone and use them for storage of all that raw data. On landing you can remove the snowcone(s) and ship it off to Amazon and all that raw data is available on S3 the next day. There's a bunch of other defense-type applications. Embassies could transfer these in diplomatic pouches for top secret information. In fact, if you wanted to be particularly secure but wanted lower latency, you could use the snowball to transfer a bunch of random bytes to use as a one time pad, which the embassy or intelligence center could use on demand as it transfers data back.