Wil Gomez, writing for Mac360:

Apple has hundreds of millions of customers who use an array of cloud-based services. These include iCloud backups and storage, of course, but also include iTunes music and media, the various App Stores, Apple Music, and much more. Can you name another technology company with more cloud customers than Apple?

What Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and even IBM’s SoftLayer combine to provide is a rapidly scalable environment to store data and run computer services for Apple’s cloud-based requirements which are as complex and large as any other technology company in the world.

And:

Since the iPhone launched, the Mac’s customer base has nearly tripled. The iPad customer base is four times as large as that. Likewise, the iPhone now has more than 700,000,000 million users, and iOS alone has more than 1-billion accounts (iPhone and iPad). Most of that growth has come about in the past five or six years and Apple could not scale its own massive cloud infrastructure fast enough to keep up.

Good explainer to accompany yesterday’s news that Apple has signed up to use Google’s cloud services.