Apple and Google are apparently expanding their business relationship: Apple is now by far Google’s largest customer for cloud storage space and is expected to pay $ 300 million this year for how The information reported with reference to an informed person. This is an increase of around 50 percent compared to the previous year.
According to the report, Apple has stored over 8 exabytes of data on Google’s servers. The second largest Google Cloud customer is the TikTok provider ByteDance, which requires 500 petabytes many times less. Apple is therefore internally codenamed “Bigfoot” at Google Cloud, notices The Information an.
Photo libraries and backups
Apple has long relied on external providers to cover the storage requirements for iCloud. The group does not seem to be able to expand its own cloud infrastructure and data centers fast enough to be able to completely cover the growing storage space requirements of the customers. Among other things, Apple allows iPhone backups and the entire photo and video library to be saved in iCloud.
So far, individual users can book a maximum of 2 TB of storage space; in the USA, 4 TB are also possible in combination with the Apple One bundle. In the future, Apple will rename the paid part of iCloud to iCloud + and want to integrate additional functions such as a private relay service for encrypting DNS requests and concealing the IP address.
Apple: No keys from third party providers
In addition to Google Cloud, Apple currently also uses Amazon Web Services and possibly other providers – this is what Microsoft Azure was called in the past. Apple emphasizes that each file is broken down into parts, “which are encrypted by iCloud with AES-128 and a SHA-256 key, which is derived from the contents of the individual parts”.
Keys and metadata should remain in the user’s iCloud account, encrypted file parts are stored with third-party providers, “without any information that can be used to identify the user,” as Apple emphasizes. The partners are also unable to decrypt the users’ files. Apple itself still has the key to a number of iCloud services, including iPhone backups.
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