They're both big companies with a lot to lose. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon.... they invest a lot into security just to keep up the front facing image.
I doubt that, Apple operates by sourcing from whoever currently has the best parts, investing in that just means that money will go down the drain when someone one ups them where as now they just change to that better supplier
Apple also use AWS, apparently two years ago spending $30 million per month. They used to leverage Azure as well but picked up Google back in 2016.
They invest but there is a level of pragmatism of outsourcing bulk storage to third party vendors. It makes more sense to pay AWS and Google to store those chunks of data and have them be responsible for additional replication. Depending on how Apple has structured the pieces, having copies on two independent clouds allows for handling outages in a single vendor (including Apple themselves if they handled storage) and for the other clouds possibly locating data in regions closer to the user (e.g. Australian user data for iCloud stored primarily in Australia to provide a better experience for those users rather than round tripping to somewhere in the US). Setting up global data centre presences is complicated and expensive, why not outsource the easy block storage?
You can’t or choose not to read do you. Google has no access to the encryption key so cry about privacy and I’m not sure what human rights has to do with this story but I guess if you’re a full time crybaby about Apple and Tim Cook this is the place for you.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. Encryption doesn't mean that the Feds can't subpoena the encryption keys - and any system that will be in place today will have that.
And Google isn't stupid enough to access their customer's (Apple) data. Both of these companies have massive legal departments and more than enough surveillance in place that it would be obvious if there were breaches.
I think you might have misplaced a decimal there... By my math it's more like $1/month for 32GB, or more accurately, just under 29GB, since 8 Exabytes is actually 8,589,934,592 GB, due to the binary, rather than decimal multipliers (8*2^30 or 8*1024*1024*1024).
You don't need to trust Google, you just need to trust Apple.
Wow. You expect all of the companies that you deal with to tell you what outsourcing they do? Look at the T's and C's (not that anyone reads them) - you'll quickly find that they can do whatever they like in terms of changing their service infrastructure without giving you any information whatsoever.
No assumptions, I know the US law on subpoenaing the private keys on your device.
I registered an account on macrumors so I could like this comment. Well done.
Apple has dramatically increased the amount of iCloud user data it stores on Google Cloud, according to The Information.
The report claims Apple now has over eight million terabytes of data stored on Google's servers. As of mid-May, Apple was reportedly on track to spend around $300 million on Google cloud storage services this year, which would represent an increase of roughly 50% from all of 2020. Apple is said to be the largest corporate client for Google Cloud, dwarfing other high-profile customers like Spotify.
Google Cloud staffers have apparently even given Apple an internal code name that hints at its size as a customer: "Bigfoot."
Apple relies on a combination of its own data centers and third-party cloud storage services, such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, to store iCloud user data like photos and messages. Apple does not provide third-party cloud storage providers with the keys to decrypt user data stored on their servers, ensuring a strong level of security.
The report speculates that Apple's increased use of Google Cloud suggests the company's rising cloud storage requirements have outpaced its ability to develop and operate its own data centers needed to handle the resulting data.
Article Link: Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
This is Apple using Google Cloud as a cloud service provider similar to how aws or azure would work. Google would only see encrypted gibberish as they aren’t given the decryption keys. The only data they can glean from this how much storage Apple is using on their servers and how much compute power is being consumed by iCloud.
