If you are not a hobbyist, you already have salaried IT staff. It costs nothing to plan for this “project”, and it does not take much to keep it running – storj keeps it running. Making sure container is alive does not add any workload to people who’s job responsibilities already include keeping an eye on other containers.
It it creates an extra non-negligible expense - obviously, don’t run the node. In the extreme, dont’ hire an IT consultant to help you setup and maintain the node. “Use what you have”.
I remember reading on this forum that storj targets to keep monthly payouts to node operators at about $130k. It’s not even a salary for ten entry level IT personnel. Of course paying someone to maintain nodes is not expected.
I do not see much of risk here, at least not from storagenode - it doesn’t execute what it has received and cannot do so, since it stores only one piece of the erasure stripes from a segment of the encrypted file. Basically it’s a digital noise, which is unable to harm anyhow.
But the misconfiguring a firewall (e.g. disabling it) may lead to a hack. This is a usual concern when you expose something to the internet and not related to Storj.
I would like to ask, did you consider to store your data on Storj instead of your own kind-of-DCs? We have a geofence feature, if that is a concern, so likely you can setup a bucket to do not allow the data to leave the specific geographic region (I understand, that even if it’s encrypted, there are could be some mandatory local regulations).
For the special software you can use cunoFS and that software even didn’t notice that is now use an encrypted distributed object storage.
There have been spikes every 12 hours (around 7am/7pm EST - with the pm spike consistently a bit larger) for weeks now. You can see it in Th3Van’s top two graphs (adjusted for his local timezone).
As I type this (around 6:30am EST) I’d expect to see the next one start in about half an hour. Maybe some sort of customer backup jobs (they’d have to be pretty big)?
We’ve verified the firewall configuration today through our CTO, and it has been confirmed to be secure without any issues. Additionally, our technical team also advised that there doesn’t seem to be any significant concerns, so we’ve decided to continue operating as we are.
As for using Storj as our data storage solution, we’re approaching it cautiously and observing the situation. While the cost of data storage with Storj is indeed much cheaper compared to other online services and has been on our radar since the beginning, we’re still hesitant, even with AWS.
The geofence feature is new to us, and it sounds promising—we’ll definitely discuss it further. We’ll also make sure to bring up cunoFS in tomorrow’s discussions. Thank you for the advice!