Box Infra: Scaling the cloud

The most critical duty we have at Box is to ensure that we meet our availability, security, privacy, compliance, and performance requirements while we simultaneously deliver new product functionality rapidly. Our cloud platform is enabled by a proprietary cloud architecture (Box Infra) that ensures we can seamlessly serve tens of millions of users across nearly a hundred thousand customers globally, storing tens of billions of files (growing exponentially), while innovating continuously. All on a single platform.

This is no easy feat, but for 15 years we've been continuing to enhance and improve the Box Infra strategy to serve the growing demands of our customers in a range of industries and geographies. To meet these diverse and rapidly scaling needs of customers, Box Infra leverages a combination of private data centers and certain third-party cloud vendors (such as AWS, GCP, IBM, and Azure). For example, we deploy Box Zones (optional in-region data storage) to customers by using a combination of third-party cloud vendors to provide file transfer, data processing, and other infrastructure needs.

Customers of all sizes, globally, are increasingly looking to quickly move more content to the cloud without ever worrying about scale limits, while also meeting their stringent security and compliance obligations. And as usage of Box continues to grow due to remote work push and accelerated digital transformation, we will continue to leverage this hybrid, hyperscale architecture to meet our customers' global security, compliance, and scalability needs.

Here are a number of ways in which Box Infra strategy supports our customers:

• Security and compliance: Our Box Infra strategy enables us to achieve the most advanced compliance requirements --like PCI, FINRA, HIPAA and GxP-- and can enable new third-party security technologies that will be important to many of our customers. For example, AWS and GCP are both currently certified to meet FedRAMP High requirements. Additionally, we plan to extend our use of more advanced encryption techniques such as key management services to more aspects of our databases, search, and metadata to extend customer control and security.
• Scale: Box manages hundreds of petabytes of content, tens of billions of files, being accessed by millions of users daily, all growing at an exponential rate. To ensure the right availability and scalability of our platform, we can leverage multiple cloud platforms globally to meet this growth. Importantly, customers can choose exactly where they want their files stored geographically to help meet data privacy requirements, and we provide the right level of compliance for their storage needs.
• Business continuity and fault tolerance: Even though system failures and unexpected events are part of the reality of the world, we architect Box Infra to anticipate and mitigate these types of challenges. When you upload content to Box, we ensure your files are  redundantly stored in multiple data centers in the region(s) of your choice. Our storage durability helps customers stay ahead of concerns like data backups, data loss from a regional disaster, or fault tolerance.
• Performance and availability: Box performance benefits from using multiple regions in the cloud since there are fewer network hops and latency between end users and Box servers. Customers who have used Box Zones have been able to take advantage of these capabilities with regional storage and file distribution capabilities. We typically see downloads are 50%-100% faster when downloading files in region compared to when downloading from servers thousands of miles away. With our evolving hyperscale infrastructure, all customers will be able to take advantage of the same performance and availability benefits with regions deployed throughout the US and beyond.
• Breakthrough innovations: As our product features and capabilities continue to advance, we are building capabilities that leverage cutting edge cloud technologies to improve performance and scalability of services like machine learning, search, metadata, insights, reporting, security features, and more. These new platform services will ensure customers are able to gain more insight and intelligence from their content in Box, all with complete control of their data.

At Box, our mission will always remain delivering the most secure, compliant, and scalable platform for managing content in the cloud. And our Box Infra strategy will continue to put us at the forefront of this innovation, and our customers will continue to see the benefits of this architecture in the near and long-term.