Lessons From Dropbox’s Cloud Makeover

I read with great interest the recent CIO Dive article on Dropbox’s trend-bucking move to a private cloud infrastructure. The article noted that Dropbox has transferred some 90 percent of its IT infrastructure away from Amazon Web Services and on to a custom-built, internal cloud network. The move required migrating several hundred petabytes of data from AWS to a home-grown system the company is calling “Magic Pocket.”

The company is currently closing in on 200,000 paying business customers and has signaled a renewed focus on business fundamentals and profitability. Dropbox is apparently banking on its data center migration to support the next generation of features for its cloud storage and file-sharing software.

Of course, Dropbox built its business on a hybrid cloud platform. An early Amazon S3 adopter, the company maintained personal file content for an estimated 500 million users on AWS, while hosting metadata and web servers on its own data centers.

If there’s a take-home, it’s this: IT infrastructure needs change as markets develop and business grows. Regardless of whether your IT infrastructure is in your own private cloud or in the public cloud, what’s most important is making sure the data is being managed correctly — and that all software and hardware is optimized to deliver the best performance. Leveraging the right hybrid IT service provider can help, regardless of whether your data is on the public cloud, private cloud or both.

Read the full article here.