The main disadvantage of S3 Intelligent Tiering is that it acts as a black-box – you move objects into it and cannot transparently access different tiers or set different versioning policies for the different tiers. You have to manipulate the whole of S3 Intelligent Tier as a single bucket. For example, if you want to transition an object that has versioning enabled, then you have to transition all the versions. Also, when objects move to the archive tiers, the latency of access is much higher than the access tiers. Not all applications may be able to deal with the high latency.