Zettabox was a pan-European online cloud storage and team-sharing tool, created by co-founders James Kinsella and Robert McNeal. The company's operational headquarters was located in

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

, whilst the Sales and Marketing decisions are headed up in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. At the time when Zettabox was founded, the total amount of worldwide data saved on networks had surpassed 1,000

Exabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

and entered a new era of sizing storage –

Zettabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

(1 x 1021). The company seems to be out of business.

EU Data Law Regulation

With the cloud team sharing and storage market heavily dominated by American-domiciled companies, such as

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...

and Box.com, Zettabox was launched as the European alternative. The launch coincided with the news of the impending

General Data Protection Regulation The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), abbreviated GDPR, is a European Union regulation on information privacy in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of ...

(part of the

Digital Single Market The term digital single market refers to the policy objective of eliminating national or other jurisdictional barriers to online transactions, building on the common market concept designed to remove trade barriers in other commercial fields. ...

strategy) which requires all companies doing business in Europe, to know where their data is stored and be able to communicate this information to their customers. More recently, in 2018 and 2019, a series of privacy violations at Facebook and other social media companies has renewed calls for greater scrutiny of how the largest companies use and misuse users' data. Zettabox has been described as being 'an example of a genuinely European cloud storage solution' in "The EU Data Protection Reform and Big Data Factsheet". The European Commission cited Zettabox as the first major pan-European alternative to the US-based cloud storage products like Google Drive and Dropbox.

References

Cloud storage Cloud computing providers {{network-software-stub