Apple may be preparing to switch some of its online services from being hosted by Amazon's infrastructure to Google's, according to a report. It is claimed Apple has reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services, which is said to be used to operate aspects of iCloud, in favor of using Google Cloud Platform, in what could be an attempt by Apple to reduce its reliance on Amazon, and in turn potentially save money as part of the changeover process.
Sources of
CRN claim Apple signed a deal with Google late last year. The deal is allegedly costing Apple between $400 million and $600 million in Google Cloud Platform charges, though it is unclear if this is an annual rate or for a different period of time. A report from Morgan Stanley last month places Apple's annual spend on AWS to be around $1 billion, though the supposed deal won't necessarily be a major cost saving, as AWS will still be used by Apple for the moment.
Shifting some services away from AWS to Google may help Apple in the long run, not just as a potential cost-saving measure. Spreading out its assorted cloud services between multiple vendors minimizes the damage a major incident for one hosting provider could perform on Apple's services, potentially lowering the number of services going down simultaneously.
While it will continue paying out millions of dollars to Amazon and Google for cloud services, Apple may not have that much longer to wait before leaving them entirely. Apple has spent $3.9 billion on constructing data centers in
Arizona,
Ireland, and
Denmark to add to its existing operations, allowing it increased control with regards to storing customer data and its major services.
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