AppBridge Blog Evernote Migrates to the Google Cloud

In a recent blog post entitled, Evernote's Future Is in the Cloud (by Ben McCormack, VP Operations), the company announced its intention to migrate the back-end of it's wildly popular note-taking app to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).From the post: "the question was this: can a cloud service give our 200 million customers the high level of quality, performance, and security they expect and deserve from Evernote? We believe it can...With Google Cloud Platform, Evernote will gain significant improvements in performance, security, efficiency, and scalability. Moving to the cloud also allows us to focus time and resources on the things that matter most."If a successful company with over 200 million customers feels the best course is to migrate its data from in-house servers to Google servers, what does that mean for the on-premises vs. cloud hosting debate? Well, the debate has been over for a long time and railing against the cloud is not time well spent. However, there will always be a question of scale, and Evernote's decision to move to the cloud has added a valuable data point in that conversation. Essentially, it goes like this: if I have my own servers, at some scale, they have to be cheaper and more efficient than paying someone else to run and manage them for me. In the past, that ROI point was not clear--unless you happened to be Facebook. Maybe it's not perfectly clear now where the line lies, but it's certainly moved so far as to not even be an issue for most companies. Over 200 million users is a pretty high bar for that line (to mix some metaphors).Of course, those of us at AppBridge are biased. After all, we've been migrating customers to Google Apps (now called G Suite) for years. But setting aside that fact, it's still plain to see that the cloud has taken over all but the most stubborn of deployments. If it's cheaper and easier to run EverNote on cloud hosted servers, then it's almost certainly cheaper and easier to run the vast majority of applications in the cloud.And how about security? Time and again, it has been proven that the small dedicated security teams at cloud hosting platforms outperform in-house staff. In other words, cloud servers and more secure than private servers. One example is that EverNote's move to GCP will add encryption at rest for all their user's data. If this is all true for application data, then it's certainly also true for your organization's content.McCormack wrote that they didn't make this decision easily. They went through an "intensive period of research and investigation" before choosing to migrate to Google Cloud. In our experience, the same can be said for content migrations. Perhaps some will continue to argue against migrating to the cloud, but the evidence is overwhelming--it's past the time to embrace the future. Related: TechRadar argues that Google's machine learning features are a big part of EverNote's move to the Google Cloud Platform.