A major cloud storage company is exiting the consumer market

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Cloud storage provider Zoolz has sent an email out to customers telling them its home cloud backup service will be discontinued with immediate effect, so the company can better focus on the business market.

It seems the 15-year old SaaS company - which sat third in our best cloud storage guide - underestimated the challenges of the consumer cloud backup market.

Understandably, smaller companies have a tough time grappling for market share with the likes of Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud and Amazon Drive. Even players as large as Samsung have had to close down their cloud storage offerings.

“The cloud backup market is a competitive one. We entered it 15 years ago with the hope that we could make it accessible to anyone, both business and home users," wrote Zoolz in a statement.

"Even with the many changes we’ve made to how we structured our cloud backup services, we’re unable to competitively service the consumer market.”

Zoolz users will have 14 days to retrieve their data while refunds are processed. As a sweetener, the company will offer 5TB storage to anyone that wants to migrate their home account over to the business plan for £90/$120.

The company - which reportedly manages more than 20PB of data and three million users - will double down on b2b offerings with a new multi-tenant system, disaster recovery and Microsoft 365 business backup.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.