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Dropbox’s IPO filing, confirmed late last week, makes for very interesting reading. For a start, it confirmed the rumours<\/a> swirling around last month, as well as ensure the company won’t be making the next Forbes Cloud 100 list, having been ranked<\/a> the second biggest private cloud firm two years running.<\/p>\n Yet more importantly, it showcases the company’s recent direction of travel – and where it is heading. Under the ‘recent initiative’ section of the S-1 filing<\/a>, the storage provider outlined its initiatives to ‘improve the efficiency of the infrastructure that supports [its] platform’.<\/p>\n “These efforts include an initiative that focused on migrating the vast majority of user data stored on the infrastructure of third-party service providers to our own lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities that we directly lease and operate,” the company wrote. The process, called ‘infrastructure optimisation’, which is still ongoing in places, saw a reduction in cost of revenue, an increase in gross margins, and an improvement in free cash flow.<\/p>\n Speaking of margins, Dropbox posted revenues of $1.1 billion in 2017, a 31% increase from the year before, and seeing a gross profit of $737 million. Yet the ‘infrastructure optimisation’ process the company has undertaken is moving away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its own solution. This would be known as ‘Magic Pocket’. In March of that year, Akhil Gupta, Dropbox vice president of engineering, explained<\/a> that the process of building its own dedicated storage infrastructure had taken two and a half years and had resulted in more than 90% of users’ data on the custom-built product.<\/p>\n