Dive Brief:

• Dropbox announced Monday that it plans to move away from Amazon Web Services' cloud storage, focusing instead on its own internal cloud.  
• The company said that as of October 2015 it was storing and serving 90% of users' data on its custom-built, internal cloud network.  
• Dropbox said it will continue its relationship with AWS, relying on the company to store data in Germany for European Business customers that request it, according to the announcement.  

Dive Insight:

With 500 million users globally, Dropbox said it had reached the point where it made more sense to build its own private cloud.

"Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case," according to the announcement. "As one of the world’s leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics."

Dropbox began building its own dedicated storage infrastructure, dubbed "Magic Pocket," in 2013. Conceivably, the company’s incremental costs will go down as a result, though it will take time to see if the savings materialize. ​

In February, Netflix, which also uses AWS, said that it completed its cloud migration after shutting down its last data center bits used by its streaming service. The process took seven years.