Why The Best File Sharing Providers Don't Use Amazon Cloud

In just ten short years, Amazon Web Services has emerged as the premiere cloud-based services providers operating anywhere in the world. According to the company's own 2015 keynote, they had more than a million active customers each month in 190 different companies. The tides may be changing, however, as more and more of the best file sharing providers are actually moving AWAY from the Amazon Cloud for a number of compelling reasons.

The Best File Sharing Providers Don't Use Amazon Cloud - Here's Why

The Dropbox Situation

In May of 2016, file sharing mega provider Dropbox announced that it would all but sever its existing relationship with Amazon and its file sharing Amazon cloud services. Dropbox moved over 90% of its data away from Amazon and into a cloud of its own design, building custom storage servers that were mirrored across three regions in the process. For those wondering, 90% of Dropbox's data equates to roughly 500 PETABYTES of information.

This Dropbox situation is in no way unique - in the last few years, many file sharing providers have made the decision to move away from Amazon and into an architecture of their own design. On the one hand, it highlights the argument that a public cloud provider like Amazon no longer makes sense when you start dealing with a business beyond a certain size. Experts agree that in Dropbox's case in particular, their incremental costs will actually be reduced by building its own infrastructure, scaling it and maintaining it.

Moving into the private cloud (as file sharing providers like Sharetru have been doing for years) also brings with it a wide range of benefits for both the businesses and their own end users. When a company manages and maintains its own infrastructure, security is increased as a result. Physical security, firewall rules and even the type of network intrusion and anti-virus software that are in place all helps close security vulnerabilities that are a simple "cost of doing business" when you're talking about a completely public environment.

Moving into the private cloud like Sharetru has also allows file sharing providers to increase not only the variety of services they can offer to their customers, but also the performance. The private cloud is equally as scalable as something like Amazon's public cloud, as resources like disk space, RAM and CPU power can be addressed as that business grows. If a file sharing provider is in the public cloud and their own user base grows beyond their expectations, they'll find themselves in a rush to find a better provider to meet these new needs. With the private cloud, businesses can take care of everything in-house as needed and their end users get to reap the full benefits of that decision.

A Final Comment

Amazon AWS was originally intended to service the testing and development community, not the IT community. It was designed to allow developers to quickly “spin up” computing resources and pay for them only while they were “turned on”, thus allowing testing at any scale at a low short-term cost. It was not originally designed to compete on a performance level with in-house IT infrastructures. Does it now offer performance? Maybe, but only at the expense of high cost and lack of control.