Dive Brief:
- Apple has started designing its own servers to prevent tampering and snooping of its hardware during shipment, according to a report from The Information.
- The company has "long suspected" that third parties have intercepted its servers in the past, adding chips and other firmware to make them easier to infiltrate, according to the report.
- In the past, the company had people take pictures of its motherboards and annotate the role of every visible chip to justify their function.
Dive Insight:
Reports of snooping comes as Apple and the FBI continue their ongoing legal standoff over orders for the company to unlock an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Last week, the FBI said it had a possible method for unlocking the terrorist's iPhone and postponed its scheduled hearing with Apple.
The National Security Agency has also been known to intercept and modify equipment a companies hardware is en route, according to Ars Technica. Concerned with security and any potential backdoors into its products, Apple will likely take steps to further increase security measures.
Companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have long designed their own servers and as leaders in the cloud market, they are also responsible for hosting other's information. But Apple is bucking the trend of moving fully to hosted cloud services and is instead looking to rely more on its own infrastructure.
With its own hardware, the company is looking to improve both efficiency and security. Apple plans to build 2.5 million square feet worth of data centers in Arizona, Ireland and Denmark to house the company's offerings, like iCloud storage and iTunes. Apple earlier reported that it will have to spend about 30% more on data centers, offering further incentive for it to move away from using other company's data storage services.