Enhancing Data Security: Potential Partnership Between Langmeier Backup and Storj for Revolutionary Decentralized Storage Solutions

[jammerdan]

@GeorgeLS

A couple of follow-up questions for you:

1. Have you seen any common pitfalls or challenges with other integrations that used both S3 Gateway and Uplink? Any lessons we should keep in mind?
2. How important do you think it is for enterprise users to have features like geofencing and managed passphrases compared to regular users?

1. No, I am just a SNO and have no further insights. I was referring to the statement of Storjs COO in this video:

DePIN Hub - 021 - STORJ - A faster, cheaper, and greener alternative to AWS S3

Check it out, it is quite interesting.

To use S3 gateway for uploads and native integration for downloads seems an interesting idea to be able to get fast uploads avoiding the expansion factor and fast downloads benefitting from erasure coding and parallelization. However using the Storj S3 Gateway means to use server side encryption. So you’d probably either let your customer choose if they want that or offer additional encryption of the backup before uploading. I believe you could also setup your self-hosted S3 gateway if you have the skills to manage it.

For more experience on integration you should talk directly to Storj: https://meetings.hubspot.com/tom1581?uuid=9922cc0d-aa51-49ab-8560-d7e361414b81

2. I believe geofencing is very important for users enterprise or private espescially in the EU. due to privacy laws. For enterprises there is the GDPR and private users are often also privacy minded and don’t want to store their data outside of the EU. With geofencing this can be achieved and only nodes within the EU get selected for uploads and storage. So it should be an important feature for companies that want to or need to meet that GDPR requirement.
   Regarding managed passphrases you should again talk to Storj. It was their experience with customers that led to the development of this feature, it is still in development for example: Satellite-managed encryption passphrase: Remove encryption warning step during access creation · Issue #7020 · storj/storj · GitHub

I don't know the exact implementation, but I am generally not so fond of this feature as the whole idea about this web3 storage was that Storj does not know your passphrases and could not snoop on you or give 3rd parties access to your data even if they wanted to. With Storj managing passphrases for customers receiving court orders to check if the passphrases can be obtained from them seems inevitable. If your company decides to provide a Storj account or a bucket for your customers to upload their backups to it, you probably should be transparent about whether or not the passphrases to this bucket are shared with Storj.