(c)iStock.com/valio84sl

Contrasting fortunes in cloud storage this week: Google has tempted its user base with an extra 2 gigabytes of cloud storage if they have their security settings correctly configured, while the StreamNation and CudaDrive services are to shut down in the coming months.

StreamNation was launched in November 2013 with the aim of being the “first personal library in the cloud”, but the company says it hit a roadblock, and is now moving towards Project Noah, originally a side project launched in 2015 which aims to take the pain out of uploading to the cloud.

“While uploading documents is pretty fast through a normal internet connection, uploading heavy files takes a lot of time,” wrote Jonathan Benassaya, CEO and founder of StreamNation, in a blog post entitled ‘Toward a new chapter’.

“We tested different solutions to try and overcome this,” he added. “For a while, we would ship some of our users a hard drive, but we found hard disk drives were unable to sustain more than two deliveries. We also tried to have different data centres across the globe, but while we’ve experienced improved performances, it was not enough.”

For CudaDrive and Copy, a service provided by Barracuda Networks, the “difficult” decision came about after a shift in business focus.

“While this is a big change, the path forward is an exciting one as the CudaDrive engineering team will be joining forces with that Barracude backup team to accelerate the key initiatives for that product,” wrote Barracuda VP and GM storage business Rod Mathews in a company blog, adding: “There is a huge amount of opportunity in backup, data protection and business continuity features in the cloud, and adding the talented people from the CudaDrive team will allow us to more quickly and efficiently deploy new features and satisfy market and customer demands.”

On the other side of the coin, Google is dangling a 2GB carrot to users who check their security settings in line with Safer Internet Day. The move echoes the comments Brian Taptich, CEO of Bitcasa, when he told this publication back in November that competing with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google on their own terms is akin to a “suicide mission” after the former shuttered its unlimited OneDrive service.

StreamNation will be discontinued on March 8, while CudaDrive will shut down on May 1.