Productive Paranoia for Cloud Data: A Case Study

Moving an organization's data into the cloud can produce anxiety: Will that data be well protected? Will that data be available in the future? Meanwhile, a cloud vendor has a mirror image of that anxiety: How can we keep all this data safe? This talk will look at the productive paranoia motivating key elements of Dropbox's storage infrastructure. Surprisingly, the lowest layer (Magic Pocket) has roughly as much code devoted to verification as is devoted to the storage task itself. The principles and features driving us are useful reassurance for Dropbox users, but more broadly, our approach also has potential relevance for anyone responsible for data in an organization.