Seagate Shuts Down its Cloud Storage Service Wuala

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Wuala cloud storage service has been closed down by LaCie, the Seagate subsidiary has announced. The service is closed to purchases and renewals effective immediately, and it will transition to read-only on Sept. 30, 2015 before being completely shuttered on Nov. 15.

A post on Wuala’s website announced the closure, while recommending subscribers migrate to Tresorit, and offering a discount for the service of its former competitor. The post also includes a 15 question FAQ to assist customers in migrating their data.

Seagate told The Inquirer in a statement that is was discontinuing the service to focus on its consumer and SMB cloud partnerships. Wuala will issue discounts and at the end of the process delete all customer data, but the company did not provide details of the deletion process it will follow.

“Wuala’s closure is emblematic of the commoditisation of cloud storage,” Dr Chenxi Wang, VP of cloud security and strategy at CipherCloud told The Inquirer. “We’re likely to see more closures and consolidations, which will mean more end users asking the same questions about their data and business continuity.”

Cloud storage provider Bitcasa was nearly driven out of business by its unlimited storage offering last fall, but as it discontinued that service Hive launched as a free, unlimited cloud storage service. More recently Liquid Web launched a cloud storage product specifically for high volume customers, while security broker Adallom integrated with Dropbox for Business to deliver cloud storage with governance and security controls. Kim Dotcom also recently revealed plans to launch a new cloud storage service, focused on user privacy.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-storage-service-wuala-shutting-down