Tag Archives: Entrepreneurship

Stocks & Storage: Demystifying Finance Jargon, One Acronym at a Time

Post Syndicated from James Kisner original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/stocks-storage-demystifying-finance-jargon-one-acronym-at-a-time/

Now that Backblaze [BLZE] is a public company, our team has been wrestling with lots of new Wall Street jargon: IPO, EBITDA, EPS—yes, these all mean things. And if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to learn more about publicly traded companies,” or “I wonder what these tech earnings reports really mean,” only to be hit by a wall of acronyms like these when you try to do a little research: You’re not alone.

We figured, if these are going to be part of our lives now, why not share our growing understanding with you?

Enter: Stocks & Storage

This new video blog for average folks interested in investing in tech stocks. In this series, Yev Pusin, resident storage expert, and James Kisner, certified finance geek, will demystify the lingo that Wall Street and cloud storage businesses use to report on how and what they’re doing.

  • Their main goal: Simplify what should be simple.
  • Their secondary goal: Don’t be boring!

If you want to stay up to date on the latest videos, subscribe to our YouTube here, or scroll to the bottom of this page and enter your email address to get blog updates straight to your inbox.

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The (New) Perks of Being A Backblaze Stock Owner

Post Syndicated from James Kisner original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-new-perks-of-being-a-backblaze-stock-owner/

At Backblaze, we’re deeply thankful to the communities that have helped us learn and grow over the past 15 years. From our customers, to our partners, to all of our blog readers and social followers—Backblaze wouldn’t be the same without these folks. Over the years we’ve been able to thank our community with giveaways, events, and even Storage Pods. Which is why we’re excited to announce a new perks program for one of our newest communities: shareholders.

Backblaze Launches Program to Reward Investors

Since our IPO on November 11 of 2021, we’ve been buoyed by the support and commitment of individual investors and today we’re launching a program to thank them by adding some additional perks to being a BLZE stockholder.

We’ve partnered with Stockperks to launch a program that offers the following benefits to investors:

    • For current holders of 1+ shares: You’ll receive a sticker pack to outfit your laptop, car, or any other flat surface with fresh branding from Backblaze.

  • For 10 shares or more, held for at least 1 month, investors can access one of the following discounted Backblaze products:
  • For 50 shares or more, held for at least one month: You’ll receive a hat with a custom leather patch of the Backblaze logo on the front and our wordmark on the back.

For details on signing up, redeeming your perks, and other terms and conditions (see the fine print), you can download the Stockperks app here. Once you’ve created a profile, you’ll be able to start exploring the $BLZE perks program and hearing from Backblaze management as we provide investor-related updates about the firm.

About Stockperks

Stockperks is reimagining and revolutionizing how retail investors and companies connect. It’s the first multi-channel marketplace where individual investors get the perks of company ownership, companies create a community of engaged, informed and loyal individual investors, and everyone is invested in the company’s success.

Why Stockperks, and What’s Next?

From day one as a public company, we’ve tried to engage our community as deeply as possible. From inviting customers to participate in our initial public offering, gathering investor questions through the SAY Connect platform prior to earnings calls, and now, this new partnership with Stockperks—our approach reflects our customer-centric approach as a business since we were founded. Growing a public company and investing in public companies can be best viewed as long-term commitments, and our engagement with the community is the same.

We’re also pleased to share that in Q4 of this year we plan to launch our “Stocks and Storage” video blog (vlog). In the tradition of our widely-read blog, our goal with Stocks and Storage vlog is to provide useful, relevant information to our viewership. But while our blog primarily focuses on storage topics, the Stocks and Storage vlog aims to demystify financial topics (what exactly is EBITDA, anyway?) from the perspective of a newly-public technology company in Silicon Valley.

We thank you for your support and interest, and look forward to continuing our journey together on our mission to make storing, using, and protecting that data astonishingly easy.

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How Interns Can Help Your Business and the World

Post Syndicated from Jason Knight original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-interns-can-help-your-business-and-the-world/

My name is Jason Knight and I lead the Growth team here at Backblaze. There are certain annual events you experience working in tech: fiscal year budgeting, conferences, and when HR asks if you want summer interns, and you say “No.”

2020 was a different year, and as everyone knows, a lot of the difference wasn’t good. So when HR and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee reached out asking who would take interns over the summer of 2021, the stakes seemed higher. Backblaze is the most diverse company I’ve ever worked for. For me, especially in the broader context of what is happening in society today, the importance of helping to create a more inclusive and diverse workplace felt more vital than ever.

And yet, when HR came knocking, it was hard to see how having interns was going to be additive to the team. I was the only member of a new team (Growth) being spun up within the Marketing department. We had ambitious goals, and a lot to do to achieve them. I was skeptical that taking on interns would be constructive for driving results.

I was also hearing from some of my peers that they didn’t believe having interns would or could be beneficial to the company. They had come to the same conclusion I had year after year, and that was the problem. We were the problem—the company was willing to provide the resources, but a bottom line mentality was preventing us from risking our short-term success.

The choice seemed to be whether or not to risk personal and team success for the opportunity to help young people gain access to exciting and potentially lucrative careers. I wish I could say the answer was clear, but it wasn’t. My peers and I were all considering this same question, and our collective response was going to have a meaningful impact on the nature of the society we live in.

Building Internships That Work…for Everyone

After a lot of thought, I acknowledged that the primary reason I didn’t want interns was my assumption that they couldn’t create value. But as any good marketer knows, assumptions and received wisdom are often wrong. I didn’t have any real evidence on hand that interns didn’t create value. It made me wonder: What if the real opportunity was to challenge received wisdom and create a compelling argument for my peers within and outside of Backblaze to take the risk and provide a bigger on-ramp for interns across the industry?

I took a step back and organized my thoughts: What do we really want in an internship program right now?

  1. A program that adds value and makes the company money.
  2. More importantly, a model that encourages others to bring on more interns.

The Growth-positive Internship

This was an intriguing proposition, so I started to think about the internships from a “Growth” perspective. I sketched out an approach:

  1. Source candidates who have the potential to be A players.
  2. Give interns goals that can deliver clear ROI.
  3. Don’t defocus team leads with the program.
  4. Publish learnings in the hopes that other firms and leaders will also be inspired to take the plunge.

I told HR we’d take three interns. Three because for some reason, three people can generally help each other out better than one or two. I also thought the success of a program was a lot of weight to put on one intern.

It was still the middle of the winter, and we weren’t expecting the interns to join us until summertime. So I went back to work and hoped that in six months we would be in position to deliver a useful program that would improve both our bottom line and people’s lives. Which—if you know Backblaze—is right in line with our company values.

Assembling an ROI-oriented Intern Team

And suddenly, the interns’ arrival was just a month away. As I considered how to achieve my goal of a growth-positive internship, I tried to zero in on the clearest way to link their effort to value. For my team, the most attributable ROI is closest to the transaction, so I decided to start with the fantastic Sales Development Representative (SDR) team led by SDR Manager, Adam.

My thought was for the interns to spend a full six weeks working as full-time SDRs. Then maybe three weeks on, they could work on paid user acquisition putting a campaign together, and then three weeks on SEO launching a campaign. I talked to Anna, Senior Manager of Data and Analytics, about helping the interns quantify the value they were creating for their resumes, and she enthusiastically agreed to pitch in. In my mind, I could see the bullet points and action verbs filling up their incipient resumes.

This was the plan. No ramp up, straight into the deep end of the pool. Everyone was fully on board. It was time to interview some candidates.

Adam joined me, and we very quickly identified that interns fell on a spectrum with two ends:

  1. Students from elite schools with a history of relevant internships.
  2. Students from non-elite schools with few internships on their resume.

Given that the whole point of our program was to help students access opportunities that otherwise would not be available to them, I made the choice to rule out candidates who already had experience or access to our field. My fantastic HR partner, our Marketing and Sales Recruiter, Desiree, explained that this was a fairly typical experience sourcing candidates. On the HR team, they have long been focused on expanding DEI efforts in our internship program, so they have plenty of experience encouraging hiring managers to look past the brand halo elite colleges confer to applicants.

As Adam, Desiree, and I synchronized our efforts and filters, we eventually identified three people we wanted to work with: Roland, Javier, and Katie. Offers were extended, start dates and pay agreed to, and they were on their way (virtually, for all the obvious reasons).

Turning Interns Into Teammates

We also reached out to senior leaders in the Marketing department who agreed to be mentors to our interns, so VP of Marketing, Nick, worked with Roland; Director of Marketing Operations, Shannon, worked with Katie; and Senior Director of Marketing, Yev, worked with Javier. The interns started work as junior SDRs and launched their outbound sequences within a week of starting. They joined all of the Growth team meetings, and I scheduled a weekly sync meeting with them. Other than that, they functioned exactly like a junior SDR team.

The interns understood that success for them was converting our leads into sales accepted leads (SALs). To do this, they used our Growth stack: ZoomInfo, Outreach, Salesforce, Calendly, and Slack. They learned from expert SDRs what it means to be creative, work with fortitude in a rejection-based environment, and to find a way to succeed.

It took about a month before the first SALs started rolling in, but it happened, and then it happened again, and again, and again. Six weeks into their work and the program was clearly a success in every dimension we could wish. They fit into the team, they helped us achieve our SAL goals, and the whole of the Growth team enjoyed sharing their knowledge and skills with our interns.

It is probably worth taking a moment to contextualize the historical moment they were working with us: The Delta variant was spreading throughout the U.S. and political and social divisions were on the nightly news. The ambient stress level, in other words, was high for everyone. Add to that the fact that we were a new team with big goals and high expectations. All this to say: The interns could easily have been perceived as an unnecessary distraction.

But it turned out the opposite was true: In the midst of stress and ambiguity, the ability to share and help others bonded our team. Our Slack channel was 💥 filled with jokes, encouragement, and laughter. The interns were a ray of sunshine for the team, and I will never forget how relieved I was halfway through the internship that we had made this commitment.

Where the Rubber Hit the Road With the Intern Team

As we reached the halfway point, I asked the interns to think about whether they wanted to continue to work as SDRs or if they were interested in exploring what the other team members were doing: paid user acquisition, customer journey marketing, and SEO. All three requested to continue to work as SDRs, and while it was a surprise on some levels, it also made sense: The interns were doing critical work, learning skills, having success, and clearly making a difference.

Oh yeah, and they also generated $1,500,000.00 in the SAL pipeline.

Ultimately, they worked as SDRs for the whole of their internship. We will have to wait and see how much of their pipeline ends up being closed with wins, but they generated enough leads that it is hard to imagine they didn’t pay for all the internships the company provided. In other words, the program exceeded our wildest expectations, and I’m happy to report back that internships, if structured properly, can in fact add enormous value to the companies that provide them.

Looking Forward, and Thanks

I’m already looking forward to meeting next year’s interns. As a team, we will do our very best to show them why we love marketing at Backblaze.

I’d like to end by thanking Roland, Javier, and Katie for spending their summer with us. We are incredibly proud of the SALs our colleagues generated, and happy to call them friends. I remember when I was interviewing Javier and I asked him why he wanted to work at a cloud storage company, and he said “I worked at a deli near the Salesforce headquarters, and every day, all the employees would come to order food, and I couldn’t imagine what they did for the company. This is my chance to find out what it is to work in a company like that.” Now Javier knows not only what they do, but that he can succeed at doing it as well.

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Backblaze Is Now a Public Company

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-is-now-a-public-company/

Today is a big day for Backblaze—we became a public company listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLZE!

Before I explain what this means for us and for you, I want to give my thanks. Going public is an important milestone and one we couldn’t have accomplished without your support. Thank you.

Whether you have believed in us from the beginning and have been a customer for over a decade, or joined us yesterday; whether you entrust us to back up a single computer or to run your entire company’s infrastructure on the Backblaze Storage Cloud; whether you’ve partnered with us to bring our services to one individual or thousands of companies, whether you’re a first-time visitor to our site or you’ve been a reader all along: Thank you. We really appreciate you working with us and supporting us.

What Does Becoming a Public Company Mean for Backblaze?

It means we have more resources with IPO proceeds to increase investment in the development of our Storage Cloud platform and the B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup services that run on it.

The future is being built on independent cloud platforms, and ours has been 14 years in the making. Today, we take the next big step in being the leading independent cloud for data storage.

Additionally, while we help about 500,000 customers already, we plan to expand our sales and marketing efforts to bring Backblaze to more businesses, developers, and individuals that would benefit from easy and affordable data storage that they can trust.

Finally, we have built Backblaze with not only a focus on the products we provide, but with a deep care for what it is like to work here. With these proceeds, we plan to continue to significantly grow our team, and are looking for many more kind, smart, talented people to join us. (Is that you? We’re hiring!)

And Most Importantly, What Does It Mean for You?

My short answer is: It means more of the good things you’ve come to expect from us at Backblaze.

I want to emphasize that while we’ll be doing “more” for you, today’s events don’t mean that we’re “different” on any fundamental level. We’re still guided by the same principles and the same team. As a reminder, here’s the core of the values that we’ve been committed to since our founding (as written by Brian Wilson, Co-founder and CTO):

“At Backblaze, we want to provide a quality product for a fair price. We want to be honest and up front with our customers as to what we can and cannot do, and we want to be paid only the money honestly owed to us, and never engage in sleazy or misleading business practices where customers are misled in any way or pay for a service they do not receive. We are the ‘good guys,’ and we act like it.”

The only thing that’s changing today is we now have a more robust structure and additional funding to deliver on these values for more customers and partners.

If you’d like to share your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about where we started, why we decided to go public, how we did it, and more. Stay tuned and for now…

It’s Time to Blaze On!

The post Backblaze Is Now a Public Company appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Free Cloud Storage: What’s the Catch?

Post Syndicated from Amrit Singh original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/free-cloud-storage-whats-the-catch/

Major cloud storage providers including Amazon and Google offer free tiers of storage or promotional credits to incentivize developers and startups to begin storing data on their clouds. While this may seem attractive to early-stage businesses looking for an affordable jumpstart, it’s important to consider the long-term realities of scaling your business once you’re beyond the threshold of these freebie offers.

As your business evolves, so does how you utilize, store, and manage your data. Aiden Korotkin, the founder of AK Productions—a full-service video production company based in Washington, D.C.—learned this the hard way. He was quick to choose Google Cloud Storage when he was getting started, only to realize it wasn’t the right fit as his business grew.

At the time, Google offered a promotional credit. “That lasted about a year,” Korotkin said, and when the credit expired, it forced him to take a closer look at the cost efficiency and security of the Google Cloud Platform. “I realized that it’s super confusing,” he explained, “you have a lot of options, but it seems like chaos unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”

Making the Cloud Storage Decision: How Much Will “Free” Cost You?

The overhead of managing your cloud platform is only one of the factors to consider when planning your cloud infrastructure rollout. Complexity, predictability, and retrieval are all things you should keep in mind when picking the right solution for your business case. Evaluating all of these factors helps you understand the true cost of ownership and the value of the platform over time.

We hope this guide to three key factors for cloud storage selection will help you decide the right, next best step for you and your growing business.

Factor 1: Complexity

The promotional offers that many cloud storage providers boast are fairly straightforward and clear: Google Cloud Free Tier offers a three month free trial with a $300 credit to use with any Google Cloud services. AWS Free Tier offers various free services including 5GB of S3 Storage for 12 months. Both providers also have incentive funds for startups which can be unlocked through incubators or VCs which grant additional credits of up to tens of thousands of dollars. For next to nothing your data is on its way and you can move on.

But while it may be tempting to jump on one of these offers, it’s worth spending some time learning the breakdown of data storage and utilization costs for each platform, as well as understanding any longer-term or service-related fees you may be on the hook for. Decoding your monthly bill or dealing with surprising service charges when you’re managing a few gigabytes or terabytes is doable, but as you grow, navigating the tiered pricing structures that many of the legacy cloud providers operate under becomes quite complicated.

That’s a bit of an understatement. The reality of the situation is that a whole industry of consultants and businesses has sprung up around this issue. These third-party vendors specialize in helping businesses understand and optimize their cloud invoices from Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Storage. When you need to hire another business just to understand what you’re paying for, it’s time to ask some questions about whether they’re right for you.

Tiered pricing may make sense for businesses who are capable of optimizing their infrastructure to a T. But how many startups does that describe? Most early-stage entrepreneurs do not have the resources to undertake this feat of planning and engineering and find themselves struggling to keep their cloud costs down when they graduate from free plans.

As if the complexity of pricing tables wasn’t bad enough, understanding what you can do with your data once it is stored can be highly confusing, too. Consider egress fees: These are the fees you’ll pay to download your data from the cloud. Most major cloud providers including Amazon and Google charge high egress fees ranging anywhere from $90 to $120+ per terabyte. Attempting to gauge just how expensive egress will be for you can feel impossible. As a result, businesses often begin storing data on these cloud platforms with ease, but as their data sets grow, they find themselves unable to leave due to the high egress costs.

With Amazon AWS, many businesses find that the complexity transcends pricing and stretches into the functionalities provided by the platform. Without the right tools and resources, you may spend hours or days configuring your environment. Tristan Pelligrino, co-founder of Motion, a B2B content marketing agency, spent significant amounts of time simply setting up and onboarding new users. “The interface is very complex. It felt like I was recreating the wheel every time I set up a new user experience,” Pelligrino said. “It was frustrating, but someone had to do it.” The problem being, every moment he spent on AWS was time he wasn’t investing in his creative work.

Not having a 360 degree awareness of your platform’s functionality and how to properly configure it may seem like a minor issue, but sometimes the complexity can obscure vital information. Like when you discover that your backup solution isn’t actually backing up your data. The team at Crisp Video Group, a creative agency serving law firms, scrambled to recover what they could when they realized that their Amazon S3 configuration had failed to back up 109 days worth of data.

At the end of the day, understanding, and oftentimes, avoiding complexity is key in the cloud storage selection process. If it’s not crystal clear what you need and what you’re going to be paying, you may want to consider how much an initial dose of “free” will cost you in the long run. Which leads to factor two.

Factor 2: Predictability

As an early-stage startup, it’s hard to predict how quickly you’re going to grow, which makes it even harder to predict your cloud costs on a monthly or annual basis. Most cloud providers will make it extremely easy to spin up new servers and store data, but as you scale, it’s important to have a clear idea of the costs involved so that you can attain predictable growth. Without this control, cloud storage costs could spiral, significantly hurting your OpEx margins and potentially making useful data inaccessible or unusable in make or break situations.

Predicting your cloud storage costs should be simple, in theory. You have three main dimensions: storage (how much data you store), download (the fee to get your data out of the cloud), and transactions (“stuff” you might do to your data inside the cloud). Yet most vendors continue to make it extremely difficult to understand your monthly bill which adds unnecessary strain when budgeting and forecasting your cloud spend. According to ZDNet, “37% of IT executives found their cloud storage costs to be unpredictable.”

This was the case for Gavin Wade, the founder & CEO of the SaaS photography platform CloudSpot, who realized that his business’s 700TB+ of data stored on Amazon S3 was eating into their OpEx margins. Even more discouraging was the realization that it would be an even bigger financial undertaking to move the data to another service.

“We had a few internal conversations where we concluded that we were stuck with Amazon. That’s never a good feeling in business,” Wade mentioned, as his team looked for other places to affect changes and cut costs.

Being able to accurately project your cash flow is essential to being able to take advantage of other opportunities as they arise. If you make the choice early on to lock into a provider that doesn’t offer predictability on a budget line, you won’t have the clarity you need when it’s most important.

Factor 3: Retrieval

Along with tiered pricing, most cloud providers offer several storage classes meant for different use cases. Again, this may be useful if you have optimized accordingly, but more often than not, these storage classes add unnecessary complexity. This is especially true when it comes to the timing and expense of getting your data back, or, retrieval.

Amazon S3 offers the following storage classes:

S3 Standard: Active data that needs to be accessed frequently and quickly.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Moves data automatically across tiers depending on usage.
S3 Standard-Infrequent Access: Data that is accessed less frequently but requires rapid access when needed.
S3 Glacier: Long-term archive with longer retrieval times ranging from minutes to hours.
S3 Deep Glacier: Long-term archive comparable to magnetic tape libraries with the slowest retrieval times.

You’ll typically see the terms “hot” and “cold” storage used to describe the nature in which the data is stored and accessed. Hot storage, in this case, S3 Standard, stores data that needs to be accessed right away. Most cloud providers including Amazon and Google charge a premium for hot data because it is resource-intensive.

Cold storage, such as Amazon’s S3 Glacier and Deep Glacier classes, store data that is accessed less frequently and doesn’t require the fast access of warmer or hot data. This tier is commonly used for archival purposes. Though prices for cold storage systems are lower than hot storage, they often incur high retrieval costs and access to the data in cold storage typically requires patience and planning. If you are unable to predict when data will be needed and have time-sensitive retrieval requirements, cold storage may not be suitable for your needs.

As you’re starting out, it can be easy to convince yourself that some data will be less important to you in the long run, especially when making that decision locks you into a cheaper storage tier. But it’s easy to underestimate just how valuable readily accessible data can be in the long run. And whatever decision you make in this regard will only compound over time as your data expands.

Even larger organizations with years of experience in innovation, like Complex Networks, found Amazon S3’s tiered structure problematic as they scaled their production efforts. “S3 has multiple storage classes, each with its associated costs, fees, and wait times,” said Jermaine Harrell, Manager of Media Infrastructure & Technology at Complex Networks. Working with Amazon Glacier to archive content, they found that the long retrieval times and ballooning retrieval costs made the solution untenable for their specific use case.

A realistic approach to your retrieval needs is an essential day one decision if you’re in a data intensive business.

Finding the Right Platform

It helps to read the fine print to make sure there are no hidden costs or minimum duration fees associated with the cloud platform you are considering. Find a platform that is simple when it comes to pricing and billing—this will be helpful in the long run as you scale your cloud infrastructure.

As you grow, budgeting for your cloud spend should be simple, so it’s best to avoid dealing with tiered, complicated pricing structures if you can. A cloud service with a flat pricing structure will allow you to forecast your OpEx spend, without needing to scan pages of pricing tables and charts.

Lastly, if you need to tap into your data at any given moment, make sure it’s readily available without having to pay premiums for cold storage retrieval and wait days just to access your data. Cold storage options are becoming less and less useful for most modern organizations that need to tap into their data at any given moment.

Though it may be tempting to take up Amazon or Google Cloud for their incentive programs and promotional credits, the perceived price and true value of their platforms may not be apparent upon first glance. Most early-stage startups do not have the time, resources, and money to continually upkeep and reevaluate their cloud services. So even before they begin to scale, it’s important to choose a service that is transparent, predictable, and allows you to access all of your data when you need it.

The post Free Cloud Storage: What’s the Catch? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The “Aha Moment”: From Podcast Interview to Cloud Storage Win

Post Syndicated from Lora Maslenitsyna original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-aha-moment-from-podcast-interview-to-cloud-storage-win/

We live in a time when building a location-independent business—once considered a luxury—has become a near necessity. It allows more flexibility for modern teams, but most vitally it provides for future scenarios that might require remote work.

Our team recently had the opportunity to sit down with one founder who knew that a remote workforce was essential to his success. Here’s how his early challenges with cloud storage were solved thanks to one surprising conversation.

The Right Conversation at the Right Time

Thanks to his experience developing countless proposals and sales decks for companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, Tristan Pelligrino, co-founder of Motion—a B2B agency—knows just how difficult it can be to articulate the value of technology. This understanding is what drove Pellegrino and Justin Brown to found Motion. They knew they could help companies solve the challenge of communicating their value through the development of thought-leadership programs that establish authority and speak directly to their ideal customers.

As proof-of-concept for Motion’s consulting approach of initiating the right conversations at the right time, Pelligrino hosts a podcast called “Tech Qualified,” where the Motion team interviews real-world experts to provide tech marketers with best practices and solutions for B2B marketing challenges. These interviews were almost entirely informational or educational for the audience, until one guest turned the tables and introduced Pelligrino to a solution that solved his cloud storage headaches.

Small Frustrations Add Up to a Big Waste

Early on in building the consultancy, Pelligrino implemented Amazon S3 as Motion’s storage and backup provider. The service helped him grow his business to where it is today, with a workforce distributed across the globe and more than 300 clients. But the flexibility it offered came at a high price to his budget and his schedule.

Pelligrino sometimes spent up to an hour in S3 just to set up a new user. It wasn’t clear how to create read-only users, change security settings, or even share files with clients. “It felt like I was recreating the wheel every time I set up a new user experience,” Pelligrino said. He eventually figured it out, but only after combing through the knowledge base to find answers to what he felt were simple questions.

Meanwhile, he was also paying high fees to store his data in S3. He knew that S3 had different tiers of storage that could lower his monthly costs, but figuring out how to move files to another tier seemed more time-consuming than it was worth in cost savings.

These were the headaches Pelligrino was juggling when he reached out to Backblaze’s VP of Marketing, Ahin Thomas, to feature him on the “Tech Qualified” podcast. The plan was to have a discussion about how Backblaze has taken an unconventional approach to standing up to its competitors. But as Pelligrino heard Thomas describe Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s ideal customer profile, he realized that Motion was a perfect fit. Since Backblaze B2 is a pay-as-you-go service with no upload fees, no deletion fees, no minimum data size requirements, and a one-hour minimum retention period, it offered an easier, more cost-efficient solution than what he had experienced with S3.

Cloud to Cloud Transfers Are Easier Than You Think

And yet, while Backblaze B2 seemed perfect, the prospect of moving files to a different provider also seemed impossible. Pelligrino was concerned that files could fail to transfer, that he could experience pipeline failures, or that the files could get corrupted during the process. How would this impact his team, or his customers? Beyond logistical concerns, there was the question of the amount of time it would take and the punitive fees he would be charged for egress from Amazon.

But when he engaged with the solutions engineers at Backblaze, Pellegrino was assured that work and expense wouldn’t fall on his team—Flexify.IO, a Backblaze partner, would make the process easy. Flexify.IO uses cloud internet connections rather than clients’ local internet bandwidth to achieve amazingly fast migrations. Motion’s many terabytes of data quickly moved over to their new B2 Cloud Storage account.

All Pelligrino had to do was to double check that all the files transferred, then he closed his S3 account.

Time Savings Unlock Efficiencies

By switching to Backblaze B2, Pelligrino gained time and cost savings that allowed him to think about other ways to use partner integrations to create efficiencies and streamline his processes.

For example, Motion is going to start backing up individual workstations using a two-way sync. Before, when they were using S3, they never considered this possibility because of the complexity of setting it up. But with file synchronization partner GoodSync, B2 Cloud Storage can mirror separate workstations on the cloud.

In addition, Motion is making use of Backblaze B2’s Snapshot service—a convenient way to download many files at once from B2 Cloud Storage to a zip file—which makes sharing files with clients infinitely easier. This is a game changer for Motion, which is able to pay for the service with their cost savings and create a better experience for their clients.

Cloud Storage Gains

With Backblaze B2, Motion is able to reduce expenses, implement new functionalities that improve services, and achieve the location-independence that Pelligrino dreamed of when he first started the business. All it took was one conversation at the right time.

Try it for yourself and get started with Backblaze B2 today.

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