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An interesting study was published on website of Internet Measurement Conference in 2012: Inside Dropbox: Understanding Personal Cloud Storage Services.

Authors highlighted that applications running in cloud-based systems produce most of Internet traffic.

They have monitored traffic from different places within Europe from March 24 2012 to May 5, 2012 and it turned out Dropbox generated 100GB of daily traffic, which was 1/4 of Youtube traffic.

Several facts from the article:

• Dropbox stores data on Amazon cloud. It uses more than 500 Amazon VPS ( Cloud in the cloud )
• Authentication packets go through Amazon servers as well ! ( You sold us all, Dropbox. )
• U.S. data-centers are the only ones used worldwide by Dropbox. Regardless of your geo location, your data go to U.S. Considering that more than half of the Dropbox clients are outside the U.S.
• SSL that Dropbox use can be decrypted with proxy in the middle with self-signed certificate
• It keeps an opened connection for sending notifications on file system changes, which are NOT encrypted.

While Dropbox focuses on big corporations, they do not have any reason to overpay for security of small and midsize business.

Another example from 2019. An AI-related Israeli startup stored data on AWS S3 and one day their data leaked to the Internet. The company ceased to exist within one week.

Data is the new asset and there's a big race for data in the world now. The company that has data, has a better position on the market. Therefore we recommend you to learn how your data are stored: the infrastructure behind the "cloud" you are using, who has access to your data, etc, as this type of asset has special "storage conditions".