Apple stores over 8 exabytes, or 8 million terabytes, of total iCloud data on Google’s servers, says The Information in its latest report.
With an increase of approximately 50% for storage services from 2020, Apple is set to pay around $300 million in 2021, making it Google Cloud’s biggest corporate client.
The high spending has led
employees to assign Apple the nickname “Bigfoot,” as it invests far more than any other of its high-profile clients.ByteDance, Google Cloud’s second-largest single customer, stores approximately 500,000 terabytes of data. To put things into perspective, ByteDance is the company behind TikTok, meaning lots of content.
Exclusive: @Apple is on track to spend around $300 million on @googlecloud storage this year, an increase of roughly 50% from 2020https://t.co/gxOKzxpN2d
— The Information (@theinformation) June 29, 2021
Sure, Apple manages many of its own data centers. However, as the company moves more of its services on the cloud, more users adopt iCloud for photo library and file storage. In turn, Apple’s infrastructure requirements keep on increasing.
As the company cannot keep up with the humongous amount of user data, it relies on various third-party cloud storage platforms, such as
and (AWS), for user data storage.Still, Apple doesn’t share the decryption keys with these third-party platforms to provide its users with ultimate privacy. In other words, no entity can assess the user data.
Apple has been entirely transparent in the use of storage services for user data. They noted that everything stored on these services is fully encrypted and that its partners “don’t have the keys to decrypt the user’s data stored on their servers.”
Apple Platform Security further added:
Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents, with the keys using SHA256. The keys and the file’s metadata are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information or the keys, using both Apple and third-party storage services—such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform—but these partners don’t have the keys to decrypt the user’s data stored on their servers
.
Moreover, many information users store in iCloud, such as payment information or saved accounts and passwords, are end-to-end encrypted. Essentially, it means that even Apple cannot assess this information, let alone any other company.
Undoubtedly, $300 million is a lot of money. But, it’s a pale sum compared to the $10 billion or so that flows in the other direction, Google’s annual payment to Apple for being the default search engine on Apple devices.
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