Amid reports that it’s shifting some of the iCloud services to Google’s Cloud Platform, The Information is reporting that Apple has a total of six projects underway related to boosting its cloud infrastructure. One of them, code-named Project McQueen, calls for custom data storage systems.
Apple suspects that third-party servers that power iCloud might have been intercepted during shipping and that someone may have added additional chips and firmware to them “in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration,” as per the report.
Apple currently runs iCloud with a little help from third-party vendor solutions, such as Google’s Cloud Platform, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services. Building its own servers and cloud infrastructure from scratch would ensure that Apple’s servers are secure and protected from government snooping, hacking and more.
According to sources familiar with the plans, Apple at one point even assigned people to “take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there.”
However, the Cupertino firm is still “years away” from being able to completely leave its existing cloud vendors.
“The fact that Apple now has gone back and signed a deal with Google basically says they don’t have as much faith in doing this internally as they thought they did,” one of the sources said.
Apple’s other cloud-related projects reportedly call for in-house designed servers, networking equipment and systems “that could one day help developers to power their apps,” reads the story.
Source: The Information