It is worth noting that there are other E2EE cloud storage services out there such as Tresorit, which was acquired by Swiss Post last year, but Proton Drive is hoping to go several steps further in terms of its privacy promise. It also requires more memory and computing power, and E2EE is generally more expensive as it’s more difficult to compress data, which in turn leads to greater infrastructure and storage costs. For starters, it requires building entirely new frameworks for handling the passing of data between point A and point B without risking exposing any of the data to the intermediary service provider.

There are inherent challenges in introducing end-to-end encryption into cloud storage services, particularly across multiple platforms (including the web), which goes some way toward explaining why most companies operating in the space don’t offer E2EE.

The latter of those recently announced plans to bring E2EE to its own cloud storage service, but that is likely still a long way off, plus it will only be offered as a perk to business subscribers.

This positions Proton Drive favorably in a space that includes well-established incumbents such as Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive and Dropbox. What’s particularly notable about Proton Drive is that it is a zero-knowledge encrypted cloud storage and file-sharing service, meaning that nobody outside of the sender or recipient can intercept any data anywhere in the process.

Protonmail desktop app