Tomas Chlebek A week ago, news broke that Apple, in parallel with building its own cloud infrastructure, expanded the number of data centers, with whom he is working for another third party, and in addition to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, he has also bet on Google Cloud Platform. Now the magazine The Information Issued article that this indicates Apple's lack of confidence in its own ability to fully cover its cloud and secure data center needs.
Apple is said to be concerned that the security of data center equipment and components could be compromised by third parties during their journey from the manufacturer's warehouse to Apple. That's why, according to sources The Information, is currently working on up to six projects that focus on the development of its own cloud infrastructure, i.e. servers, network devices, etc. One of them is called "Project McQueen" and focuses on building its own data storage systems.
Unfortunately, Apple's concerns are well-founded. Disclosures by whistleblower and former employee of the US National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden contained information about the practices of the NSA department called Tailored Operations Access. Its job was to track shipments of servers and routers to selected destinations, which it forwarded to government facilities. There, the shipments were opened and special firmware or additional components were installed into the routers and other equipment to allow their security to be compromised.
The packages were then resealed and sent to their original destination. There have even been photos of NSA employees unwrapping packages destined for Cisco, the dominant player in the field of networking components.
Cisco solved this problem by sending packets to unknown addresses from which the NSA could not determine the final recipient. Apple decided to review all the equipment it came across, to the point where it compared photos of motherboards with precise descriptions of each component and its function. But they are more focused on developing their own devices. Fear of government intervention is not the only, but probably one of the main reasons for this.
Since Apple needs a huge amount of equipment to cover all of its cloud services, this project is a very long shot. Just the recent contract concluded with Google Cloud Platform by The Information indicates that it is still far from the goal. It will reportedly take years for Apple to be able to cover all of its cloud services with its own data centers.
