Archive != backup
Part of the issue is that a large percentage of techies don't know the difference between a backup and an archive. The comment above using the word "restore" is a good example. Glacier is not designed to be restored from, it's designed to be read from extremely rarely. This is long term resilient storage for things you probably won't need to read again.
Backup is extremely short term storage for putting things right after a mishap and 30 days is plenty long enough for almost everyone. Read your compliance documents, almost none of them tell you to keep a backup for long periods. Most of them tell you to keep certain data for long periods, and the implication is that that archive is in last nights backup or is on resilient storage and not being modified (tapes, for instance).
If there is a genuine need to read back a large portion of archive data then these costs are probably line of business costs and can easily be justified.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
