The Best Private & Secure Cloud Storage in 2024 — The New Oil
Cloud storage has become ubiquitous in modern society. The most widely-used example, I think, is the one that comes prebundled with our phones in the form of Google Drive or iCloud, but many desktop devices also come preloaded with iCloud or Dropbox (and we often add our own like Google Drive). We use them as a backup, as a way to share large or groups of files (such as a photo album from an event or vacation), and more. But not all cloud storage is equal. By default, mainstream offerings like Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox have access to your files. The consequences of this have ranged from insider threats snooping on files they shouldn’t be to people having their content or even entire accounts deleted, often for minor or no infractions and with little or no recourse. Those concerns aside, even big tech giants like Google have had problems with losing user data. So regardless of whether you’re storing sensitive, personal documents like taxes or sharing benign photos of the latest trip to the aquarium, it’s important to safeguard your personal data. And thankfully, in today’s landscape, users are awash with lots of solid, user-friendly choices who can easily take your privacy and security to the next level. So this week, let’s take a look at some of the top choices out there for secure cloud storage.
As usual, there’s a couple disclaimers worth addressing before we begin. First, as always, threat modeling. The risk of using a cloud service – any cloud service – must always be weighed against what you’re storing and sharing. For the vast majority of average users storing and sharing low-risk files, I would argue that if it's safe enough for a mainstream provider then it's even safer in one of these selections. If you’re whistleblowing against a government or major corporation, on the other hand, you probably shouldn’t be using the cloud at all. Other situations will likely land somewhere in between. Nothing is perfectly secure, so always be mindful of that. Second, some of these services I’ve linked here offer affiliate links. If you decide that any of these services are right for you, it would be appreciated if you used said link as it helps us out, but as always the direct link is also provided if you’d rather not. Finally, with the exception of the first and last entries on the list, all entries are in alphabetical order and not order of recommendation.
