I agree that temporarily reducing costs may help the company survive. But there is also a view — and it’s definitely not only mine — that the consequences should not fall exclusively on investors.
If the company ended up in this situation because of years of bad decisions, poor execution and obvious mistakes, then the people responsible for making and implementing those decisions should share the pain as well. Investors already paid for these mistakes through the collapse in value.
It would be very strange if those who screwed things up simply kept their compensation untouched while investors alone were expected to absorb all the losses.
Why stop at free? The SNOs should pay a monthly license fee for the privilege of supplying storage to a company.
We can also add an extra license fee to cover any and all company expenses. And bonuses.
Come to think of it, money for customer gas and groceries should also be covered by SNOs.
We already said what the cause for the company collapse was: trying to market to the 2 out of 10 customers and completely ignoring the other 8. I don’t blame them, I’m sure their consultant mentioned a “pareto principle” on a slide and they all followed their advice.
Storj should focus on what the product actually is: a reliable long-term storage solution. In all those millions they wasted, someone could squeeze $100K for a graphical backup client and $4m to get the public network SOC2.
I have no sales experience whatsoever, but that is half of the total of used space today, of coarse if they land a big customer that is irrelevant.
Has an SNO trying to understand Storj we do not have a clear view of the amount of storage that is Select, if it is even reported, but that is fine.
Has a potential corporate customer in Europe, if Select is GDPR compliant, when I hit the “Get Started button”, I only see SOC2, there is nothing at all saying GDPR or ISO 27001, there is nothing to catch an eye of that needs GDPR compliance nor I can find with CTRL-F, not on the home page, not on the get started, not even in pricing.
Sorry to say this, this is a marketing failure, and it is so simple to add just a bit of text even if you want to hassle a designer to make it more appealing it is so simple.
I would try and fix that ASAP, it’s not that time consuming.
If you had time, adding a backup app to Synology or terramaster could add a bit more customers.
And do you really need a minimum amount per month? Does that add anything?
Anyone can claim GDPR compliance with nothing behind it to proof that? What do we do if a customer requests compliance documents? Send them the whitepaper? I don’t think that is going to work.
However, we do not heavily promote Select, because in many aspects the Global Network is better (performance, global distribution, etc.). But we have it for the advanced cases when the customer has specific demands, like SOC2.
For US1 customers it’s implemented as a self-service. For EU1 and AP1 you need to contact sales, because in many cases for EU1 there is a paperwork attached. For AP1 we need to know a required capacity beforehand, because demand is low.
The compliance page hyperlink is hidden on the last FAQ of object storage services, not really something that pops the eye.
If the sales team is very short, why have them contact them instead of just making a process for it?
Well the biggest issue Europeans have is GDPR, and I don’t know if legally signing Storj DPA, saying that geofencing is on, or add in the terms accepted by the user so that Storj can more legally be a subprocessor is enough. It might, it might not.
Last year I was involved in the selection proces for a new backup solution. Products like commvault and veeam promote heavily there own off-site storage solutions. While they also have S3 integration. In the past I worked with a backup solution that was implemented with wasabi for offloading old backups, but the experience was always horrible. Whatever you did it was always slow, very often timeouts etc.
It would be very nice if storj would become a more accepted solution for backup products. As a system administrator I think I can benefit from some of the nice features, like fast uploads and downloads. Especially when a fast RPO is critical.
However I already see a few problems (not chapter 11 related).
Wasabi is a know brand, like Amazon, Microsoft (Azure), etc. Storj somehow is not. This is gone be an uphill battle if I would like to convince management about a brand they never read about.
Like mentioned by others: in the EU there are several different compliance rules. The security officer is gonna have a hard time when he reads about distributed storage provided by a random unknown sno. Eventually this certification should be a readably available document that can be checked of his checklist.
It would probably help if products like veeam and commvault or backup implementation partners have storj on there radar and give it there customers as an option besides one of the other S3 providers (like Amazon and wasabi).
Backup is a very big market. Maybe not in terms of egress, but the used capacity is huge. Especially with ransomware protection, off-site backups, airgapped backups, worm protection, etc, etc.
And then there’s archival storage. In hospitals you have huge repositorys with medical scans and film materials from surgerys. Especially older materials that isn’t gonna ba frequently accessed should be fine if it is archived online. As long the data is readily availability and meets regulatory rules. Integrating with one of the PACS suites (Picture Archiving and Communication System) could have potential.
About Hospitals, I spoke with one hospital IT, they hold backups on magnetic tapes. 1 tape 50-100tb. They told cloud is to expensive, as they have PBs of data.
I’m unfortunately very familiar with this one.
But luckily we stayed away from tape backups, the main reason being the very slow RTO and the hassle with tapes (switching, storing, integrity/restore testing, etc).
In the end we got a system with a lot of spinning disk capacity that give us the required RTO an RPO. But it was expensive, in the current market pricing it wouldn’t be making any sense.
But even then, management was considering putting a part of the storage in the cloud. Main reason being that you don’t need the upfront investment (pay as you go), can scale up or down, no racks or DC to manage, and green washing (they call it different ).
Even if it was in the long run more expensive than local storage, they would of have gone with a (partly) cloud based solution. In the end we could convince them to not go this route because of previous wasabi experiences, fast restores and the required retention policy. Otherwise we would still rely on cloud (wasabi) storage.
Just tell clients who want certifications that you store the data in the Select Network, but store it in the Global Network. Nobody has to know, how could one verify? Everybody lies about something.
They satisfy their lawyers with a bounch of papers and get the super speed of Global Network, while you get data and lower costs. Everybody wins.
And as we said it before many times: Storj is missing from news, social media, youtube, etc.
There should be weekly articles about Storj, no matter what they say. We need to be seen! Everybody needs to read or see something about Storj once in a while. And not a bounch of super technical parameters, just easy to visualize things for every dumb dumb out there, nice pie charts, speed records, etc. Pay influencers to speak about it, even use AI chatbots to write articles or make clips. There are many tools out there.
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