Recently, the note-taking app and productivity startup Evernote is planning to move their internal operations and 3.5 Petabytes (PB) of data, including approximately 5 billion notes, from its self-hosted two data centers to Google Cloud Platform.
Evernote has been solidifying their relationship with Google, which began with the integration of Google Drive and Evernote and their CEO Chris O’Neill has previously worked Google for a decade.
In a blog post discussing the announcement, Evernote’s Vice President of Operations Ben McCormack said that the company’s current infrastructure “lacks the speed and flexibility we need for tomorrow. In reviewing our options, the benefits of adopting a modern cloud solution for our data quickly became clear [and] using Google Cloud Platform will bring “significant improvements in performance, security, efficiency, and scalability.”
While Evernote was also shopping around at cloud platform giants Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, they were mostly drawn to Google’s machine learning APIs, especially in photo management, translation, and voice search. Integration to the Google Cloud Platform gives them greater access to their Speech API and Natural Language API tools for improving upon their handwriting/text/voice recognition and speech-to-text features. Other companies already using Google’s machine learning APIs are Ocado, Wix, and Disney.
One of Evernote’s main concerns when assessing various cloud providers was security. Evernote has previously suffered from several security breaches where in 2013, 50 million users had their password compromised. However, they decided that Google’s cloud platform security offers the best encryption. Evernote plans to maintain its “three laws of data protection” following the migration, which state that user’s data belongs to them, is protected and is portable.
Evernote is currently working with Google to finalize plans to begin moving to new servers in early October, and migration is slated to complete by the end of this year. At the same time, the company is working on developing new capabilities that take advantage of Google’s machine learning applications and cloud infrastructure in general.