Is unlimited cloud storage quietly getting the chop? Blame miners and even resellers...
This is why we can't have nice things
Unlimited cloud storage for businesses is likely to be a thing of the past if more companies go down the OneDrive and Dropbox route.
Last Thursday, Dropbox updated users via a blog post that unlimited cloud storage was no longer on offer, and that new users (of the Advanced plan) would be capped to a 15TB storage limit.
"We’re moving to a metered storage policy on our Dropbox Advanced plan, " the company's statement read.
"Over time, we found a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia [a cryptocurrency] mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage."
Dropbox also acknowledged that with other cloud storage services making similar policy changes (Google stopped offering unlimited storage in May), there has been a mass migration of malicious users to the platform.
See also: Rethinking your approach to storage platform development
On the same note - Microsoft owned OneDrive has also capped business user cloud storage to 1TB.
(This was a hush-hush change in policy, and spotted yesterday by TechRadar)
Not only do crypto miners and storage resellers use an uneven amount of storage space, it also presents a scalability challenge for cloud storage providers.
"While we prohibit abusive behaviour, maintaining long lists of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases for Advanced would not be a sustainable solution, noted the policy update announcement.
See also: Microsoft says storing digital data on synthetic DNA now viable
With a CAGR of 18% and a valuation of over $90 billion, cloud storage is a business necessity.
But most businesses have little to worry about with these changes- Drobox is going let to keep their existing storage and more for up to five years at no additional charge, while Microsoft is also only capping new users.
It's also not crisis for SMEs that will subscribe to these services in the next couple of months.
Businesses with less than 25 employees, on average, don't use more than 10TB of cloud storage. With both Drobox and Microsoft increasing storage capacity contingent on the number of users on a business plan- the current caps should work out just fine.
