Many businesses question the use of cloud for storing data due to fears around privacy and data location, Evernote clearly doesn’t consider this an issue.
The company which created the popular note taking and productivity app has decided that it will migrate all of its data to the Google Cloud Platform.
Aside from being a major customer win for Google, it is a major move for Evernote. The company will be moving around five billion notes and the data of its 200 million users.
For those that will be concerned about privacy, Evernote wrote on its site that the data will not be accessed by Google, “Your notes are not owned by Evernote, or by Google. They are yours and yours alone,” wrote Ben McCormack, VP Operations, Evernote.
The productivity app had until now owned, configured, and maintained its own servers and networks, which it said gave it the ability to build the service that was wanted.
However, while it gave them the ability to build the way they wanted, it also had limitations. McCormack said: “But it is also limiting—expensive to maintain, slow to upgrade, and difficult to scale. And while the infrastructure we have now is perfectly suited to support Evernote as it runs today, it lacks the speed and flexibility we need for tomorrow.”
The company recognised the transformative impact cloud has had and said that Google’s Cloud Platform will improve its security, performance, efficiency, and scalability.
Evernote said that it is currently working with Google to finalise the architecture and will begin syncing data to new servers in early October, which it said will take several weeks but the migration is expected to be completed by the end of 2016.
For customers there shouldn’t be any issues, the migration will take place in the background and there shouldn’t be disruption to service.
In addition to moving to GCP, Evernote is planning on using Google’s deep-learning technologies, the same ones that power services like translation, photo management, and voice search. The hope is that Evernote will be able to make use of them in order to help its customers search for information and generally improve the app.
While this move will clearly provide many benefits to Evernote, it is also a significant one for Google. The company has over the past year been revealing a string of customer adoption stories from Walt Disney, Spotify, Coca Cola, Home Depot, and more.
As well as getting itself in the news and increasing market visibility, what the deals show is a broad range of customer adoption across different sectors, with customers that range in size and age. The value of this is that Google is showing it has the cloud to fit everybody’s needs.
