Apple has signed a deal with Google to use the search giant’s Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud services, reports CRN. The site says that the two firms inked the deal late last year, and it’s believed to be worth somewhere between $400-$600 million.
This is a major coup for Google’s enterprise cloud business, and its newly appointed chief Diane Greene. Although Apple has not publicly discussed its cloud backends, it’s been reported that the iPhone maker spends $1 billion per year on Amazon’s AWS.
Reports of Apple using AWS and Microsoft Azure to run parts of its cloud services date back to 2011, although neither AWS nor Microsoft has ever confirmed that Apple is a customer. But in an Apple iOS Security white paper published in 2014, Apple acknowledged that encrypted portions of some iOS files are stored in Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.
While it might seem odd for Apple to give business to a cloud service run by a bitter rival in the mobile device market, such arrangements aren’t uncommon in a public cloud market that’s seeing intense pricing pressure, particularly in compute and storage services.
It’s believed that Apple is planning to further reduce its dependence on AWS and other cloud services by moving more computing to its own data centers. The company is currently spending billions to build new data centers in Arizona, Ireland and Denmark.
Source: CRN