Today we announced that Backblaze shareholders voted to eliminate our dual class share structure. For most of our readers, I’m guessing this news flash might be more “???” than “!!!,” but I’ll explain what it means, why it’s an exciting moment for Backblaze and its shareholders, and how it ties back to our business and our commitment to our core values of transparency and accountability.

First Things First: What Does It Mean for You?

If you’re one of our hundreds of thousands of customers and partners—this has no impact for you.

If you’re one of our shareholders or investors: We believe this is 100% good news for you as it gives you an equal say in our business. But you don’t have to do anything—this change happens entirely on our end.

For Everyone Who Is Still Wondering: What Is a Dual Class Structure?

In short, for public companies, a dual class structure means that there are different types of share classes that have different rights. Often, these rights have to do with voting privileges. For example, previously Backblaze had two classes of common stock: Class A and Class B. Class A shareholders get one vote for every share of the company they own. Class B shareholders get ten votes for every one share they own. These are often referred to as “super-voting” shares.

When shareholders would vote on shareholder proposals, the Class B shareholders would theoretically have more sway than Class A folks due to the greater voting rights. After today, this is all a lot simpler and more equal as we only have one class of shares and shareholders.

Why Ever Have a Dual Class Structure?

Roughly 30% of newly public tech companies go out with a dual class structure. Often founder-led companies, like ours, are advised to use dual class structures at the outset to help maintain continuity and focus in the initial years as a public company.

Why Are Backblaze Shareholders Getting Rid of Dual Class?

• It is fair and good. Being “Fair & Good” is one of our core values. After receiving feedback from various shareholders, potential investors, and corporate governance practitioners that a dual class stock structure is seen as negative by some, we aligned that supporting a single share class is “fair & good” both for corporate governance and for shareholders.
• It is no longer necessary. This November marks two years since our debut as a public company. We feel that our strategy and values are well aligned and ingrained with our path as a public company. Metaphorically speaking, the training wheels are unnecessary.
• It delivers equality for shareholders. Having a single class of shareholders supports our belief in shareholder democracy and continues our efforts toward empowering those who choose to invest in our business. We also believe this broadens the potential group of investors in our business by enabling a level playing field.

Here are the more technical details about the change: Backblaze Class B shares will be converted to Class A shares on July 6, 2023. The conversion has no effect on the economic rights of holders of shares of Class A common stock or Class B common stock, except for the elimination of the different voting powers of the two classes of stock.

Why Talk About This At All?

Backblaze IPO’d because it aligned with our company values and long-term goals, and we’ve benefitted from feedback from shareholders, in-depth industry analyses, and expert direction from our board and others. Part of getting that feedback is sharing out as much as we can about the process. Transparency is, after all, another one of our key values, so sharing the thinking behind this decision is as important as making it, from our perspective.

Looking Forward

As we move into our next phase of growth as the leading specialized storage cloud, we’re happy we can do so with each voice having equal weight. This is an exciting moment for Backblaze shareholders and we are grateful to see this positive change come to fruition.

The post Backblaze Shareholders Eliminate Dual-Class Share Structure appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

In late December of 2022, the email arrived from the auditor. A deep breath and a mouse click later and the word “Congratulations” jumped from the screen. Backblaze had passed our SOC 2 Type 2 examination with no exceptions noted. The examination covered both our Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage service and our Backblaze Computer Backup service.

It was the end of an important milestone that had begun years ago, and we wanted to take a few minutes to look back and share the lessons we learned along the way as we created and built a successful SOC 2 certification program. Whether you’re interested in how we made the journey, or how your organization might follow in some of our footsteps, we thought the things we learned along the way were worth sharing.

Background

SOC stands for System and Organization Controls, with SOC 2 being a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). The standard is based on the Trust Services Criteria (TSC) which specifies how organizations should manage and protect customer data. The specific criteria you will use are based on your organization’s business operation and practices. An outside auditor reviews and tests your practices and procedures to ensure you are complying with those criteria.

“When it comes to selection of criteria and implementation of controls, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to identifying the scope, as it is critical for a company to first understand what controls are applicable to their products and services, and how they would fit within their very own environment.”
—Evangeline Cheung, VP and Associate General Counsel, Backblaze

Given the uniqueness of the criteria each organization will use, we are not going to get into the mechanics of SOC 2 criteria selection here. Instead we will focus on the process you can expect as you go through your SOC 2 journey.

The Importance of SOC 2

Over the past several years, many organizations have started asking, and even requiring, their vendors to be SOC 2 compliant and verified by a third party auditor to ensure the vendor is providing a service which adheres to a defined set of industry best practices for data protection.

While Backblaze utilizes data centers which have a current SOC 2 report and/or other similar certifications such as ISAE 3402, ISO 27001, or ISO 20000, we are seeing an upward trend of customers and prospects asking for a SOC 2 report covering the Backblaze service and platform. This makes sense—while everyone is comfortable their data is safe in the data centers we use, they want to ensure our cloud storage platform and its associated applications are also safe. To address their concerns, the compliance group under our legal department kicked off our SOC 2 program.

Getting Started

There are many tasks you do at the beginning of any project, such as conducting a kickoff meeting, creating a project plan, and so on. We’ll focus on a handful of things you will need to do for your SOC 2 project.

Executive Buy-In: Okay, every significant company project needs this, but given the resources and support you will need for project success, this is a must. You will not be able to fly the SOC 2 certification under the radar of your CEO or CFO.

Stakeholder Buy-In: While a SOC 2 evaluation affects nearly every department in your organization, technical operations, information technology (IT), and engineering are the most impacted. Without buy-in from those departments to provide the necessary resources to create, document, and follow the required policies, procedures, and controls, you will not get far.

Seek Out Experience: Ask key stakeholders and others in their sphere if they’ve been through a SOC 2 or a similar certification before. Experience in the process is helpful, and having that knowledge with respect to your infrastructure and internal processes will provide you with meaningful inputs and feedback as you define your policies, procedures, and controls.

Build a Strong Core: Forming a core team with the key stakeholders is one of the most impactful steps in the SOC 2 process, as it helps provide visibility on the status of the project and identifies any roadblock issues.

“Having alignment cross-functionally through communication and transparency is key to the success of our SOC 2 program. Not only is getting buy-in from leadership key, but it is just as important to ensure that any process change is transparent to the rest of the organization and that input from process owners are thoughtfully considered as new controls are being introduced and implemented.”
—Evangeline Cheung, VP and Associate General Counsel, Backblaze

Outside Help Is Okay: Another source of help to consider (and budget for) is an outside consulting firm. This can be very useful, especially if your organization is new to the SOC 2 framework. Choose a consulting firm that understands and supports your objectives and is familiar with your business, preferably with references for having worked with similar firms.

Choose an Audit Firm That Knows Your Business: The audit firm you select is one of the more important decisions you’ll make. We reviewed and interviewed several firms before selecting Schellman as our auditor for our SOC 2 efforts. They had completed hundreds of audits for SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and so on, and they had worked with Lumen Technologies (CenturyLink), Iron Mountain, and others on the data center side, and Litmus and others on the Software as a Service (SaaS) side. That breadth and depth of experience was a great fit for us.

Tools of the Trade: A SOC 2 examination is a large multi-departmental project. While some organizations have managed the project using spreadsheets, the complexity often leads you to look at solutions built specifically for SOC 2 and similar certifications. The category is known as Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) with offerings ranging from a few hundred dollars to $50K+ a year. For Backblaze, we wanted a system that could be used for multiple types of certifications, that way we could leverage the work we did for one certification towards the next one. If you are new to SOC 2, you may want to start out with a simple, purpose-built solution. If you do, ensure that your data can be exported as needed should you decide to upgrade later on.

Don’t underestimate how long the “getting started” stage will take. Activities like selecting an auditor, choosing a consulting firm, and selecting your tools can consume months. So, start your preparation work early!

Your Path to SOC 2 Type 2

One of the decisions you’ll have to make early is where to start. The three basic steps are as follows:

1. SOC 2 Type 1 Assessment
2. SOC 2 Type 1 Audit
3. SOC 2 Type 2 Audit

If your company is new to SOC 2 and audits in general, then starting with an assessment makes the most sense, but where you start is up to you. We’ll dig into each of the steps below.

SOC 2 Type 1 Assessment Preparation

The assessment step starts with you educating your auditor about your organization. Typically the auditor will provide you with a long list of questions about your organization, how it operates, what equipment you use, what type of policies and procedures are already in place and so on. You need to be brutally honest here as many downstream actions will be based on this information. For example, based on the information you provide, the auditor will work with you to define the scope of the assessment; that is, the systems and services that will be reviewed. If you leave an important system out and the auditor finds it later, that’s—well, it’s not good. On the other hand, giving the auditor everything, whether it matters or not, can lead to an expansive, overly intrusive audit.

You’ll also spend much of your preparation time understanding the SOC 2 framework and determining what evidence you are going to use to address the SOC 2 criteria. As noted previously, the criteria and controls which apply to your business will be unique to you, although basics like risk management, disaster preparedness, encryption practices, and so on will apply in varying degrees to everyone.

We used the word evidence above; you will become very familiar with that term in the process. Evidence is the proof you need to provide the auditor to prove that your organization does indeed meet the criteria that is applicable to your organization. Evidence comes in many forms: policies, procedures, tickets, scripts, and so on.

You’ll find some evidence is useful in helping comply with multiple criteria, and you’ll find that some criteria can take 10 or more pieces of evidence to address the issue at hand. Understanding the mapping from evidence to criteria and keeping track of the evidence you have and where it applies are two of the biggest challenges in your SOC 2 project.

SOC 2 Type 1 Assessment

The actual assessment will typically be a couple of weeks long. The auditor will review your evidence and interview key employees about that evidence. Think of an assessment as a dress rehearsal. You should be ready, but the process is flexible enough for you to ask questions and fix things along the way.

The two most important learnings of an assessment are first, to determine the sufficiency of your evidence, and second, to determine how your company’s employees do in the audit process. We’ll talk more about sufficiency in a bit, because the second point is often overlooked. For example, if during the interviews your IT manager is a wall-flower—or worse, combative—in front of the auditor, you have some work to do beyond getting the evidence right.

Evidence sufficiency is a subjective term that ranges from the concrete to the creative. Sufficiency is also related to context or use. For example, a list of employees with hire dates is sufficient when you need to demonstrate who was hired in the last three months. But if the list does not have terminated employees, it does not help identify who should have access to your systems. Do you want two lists or just one? The assessment period is the time to pose and answer such questions.

After the assessment is complete, you’ll get a report outlining how well you did. It should contain a pass or fail on each of the points of focus within each criteria group. At this point, you’ll need to address how to fix the failed items and how you are going to move forward towards an actual audit.

SOC 2 Type 1 Preparation and Audit

The SOC 2 Type 1 audit is based on a date in time. The audit is all about proving to the auditor that:

1. You have all your policies, procedures, and controls in place.
2. These policies, procedures, etc, are sufficient to meet the criteria you’re addressing.
3. That you have a defined cadence of when various controls will occur.
4. You have documented how you will prove you have exercised the various controls, or you have actually taken the action and have documentation.

As an example, you have a checklist in place for new hire onboarding. The checklist has sufficient inputs from all departments involved in bringing a new person onboard. Each quarter the human resources (HR) manager will review all new hire checklists to ensure compliance with the controls in place. You have evidence of the completed HR manager’s most recent review via a ticket in your service management or other activity tracking system.

Preparation for a SOC 2 Type 1 audit is about cleaning up any missing or incomplete items (policies, procedures, controls, etc.) found in the assessment, and taking a deep breath before you plow forward towards the audit. The assessment itself can be exhausting, especially if such a task is new to the organization and the people involved. This is a good time to assess whether you had the right employees to answer questions on the subject at hand. Were they too senior or junior? How well did they answer the questions? If you need to make changes or coach up your folks, now’s the time.

You should have at least a quarter between completing the assessment and starting the SOC 2 Type 1 audit. This gives you time to test your controls, at least the quarterly ones, and have them ready as evidence for the audit. The more “we just finished that yesterday” policies, procedures, and untested controls you have when starting the actual audit, the less prepared you will feel. The auditor may also want to dig deeper into those items to make sure they do, in fact, address the criteria appropriately and you are ready to act on them when the time comes. In short, the more evidence you have that demonstrates you have done a given task, the better off you will be.

Type 1 Versus Type 2

While the SOC 2 Type 1 audit is about a point in time, the SOC 2 Type 2 audit is an evaluation of how well you document and maintain your controls over a specified evaluation period. The evaluation period is at least six months and usually no more than one year. And it is not a one-and-done thing. You will be audited at least annually to maintain your SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

The difference in the evaluation period between a Type 1 and a Type 2 is the primary reason not to jump from an assessment directly to a Type 2 audit. If you jump straight into Type 2 and you have missing or insufficient controls, you won’t know until the Type 2 audit itself, and it is too late at that point. This could lead to an exception or worse for a given criterion.

You may be able to pass a SOC 2 Type 2 examination with a limited number of exceptions, but they will be listed in the SOC 2 Type 2 audit report for all to see. You will be able to respond to any exceptions found, with your response being part of the final report. Still, it is not a good look regardless of the circumstances. Doing the SOC 2 Type 1 audit first allows you to determine whether your controls are sufficient before placing them into practice. This will minimize potential exceptions in your SOC 2 Type 2 audit that are based solely on insufficient controls.

Staggering Reviews

One mistake that is easy to make is to have all your quarterly reviews done on the same date each quarter, or even in the same month. This is especially vexing to everyone when the reviews are piled into the last month of a fiscal reporting period. Spread out the reviews of the various controls. They can be done anytime as long as they meet the cadence you specified. It’s perfectly fine to have a quarterly review on the 15th of February, May, and so on.

One way reviews can be scheduled is by using the GRC application we mentioned earlier. The nice part of using the GRC application here is that the review can be tied directly to the control, which in turn is tied to the criteria you are attempting to satisfy. The evidence gathered in the review can be captured (or linked to) in the application, then, at audit time, the review and supporting documentation are readily available.

SOC 2 Type 2 Evaluation Period and Audit

For a SOC 2 Type 2 audit you will have to demonstrate that you performed and recorded the actions specified by the policies, procedures, and controls you devised to meet the SOC 2 criteria over the evaluation period. Here are a few examples:

• You have a requirement to document the code changes, additions, and deletions for each production product build. A build typically occurs once a week, but not always. You have a change management system which documents everything you need and includes any sign-offs you captured as part of your process. You also document the weeks when there was no build. The auditor will ask for your build documentation for several different weeks during the evaluation period. This could include weeks you did not do a build. How many different weeks and which weeks they will ask for is unknown until the audit itself.
• Your risk management plan is required to be reviewed by the risk management officer once a quarter. You’ll want to have a tracking ticket showing the action was completed and, within that ticket, a note or other correspondence that discusses the findings along with any follow up actions from the review.
• Your risk management plan is required to be reviewed each year by your executive staff to ensure all appropriate risks are being surfaced and addressed in the plan, and that all risks are correctly rated. The review is documented per your risk management procedures. If the date for this review falls outside of the evaluation period, make sure you have a previously completed review ready to show the auditor if asked. Saying, “We haven’t done one yet,” is not the best answer and will only cause the auditor to dig into your risk management policies and procedures to ensure you will be ready when the time comes.

At its core, the SOC 2 Type 2 is about demonstrating your ability to consistently enact and follow industry best practices across your organization over a period of time and then demonstrate that to the auditor.

Consistency Matters

During the initial SOC 2 Type 1 assessment you will meet the actual auditors who are doing the audit. There are usually two or three auditors, each focusing on a different area where they have some expertise. As you work with each of these folks, you need to decide if this is the auditor you’ll want to use in future audits, including SOC 2 Type 1, and so on. After completing the assessment, the auditor will have a decent understanding of your organization and its quirks and capabilities. Swapping out auditors or even audit firms between the different SOC 2 phases means you’ll be starting from nearly ground zero each time.

The only downside to wanting to use the same auditor for each SOC 2 audit is you may have to wait for them to have a future hole in their schedule to conduct the next audit. Still, the consistency gained is worth the wait if, each time, you can have the same auditor with prior knowledge of how your company works.

Summary

The entire SOC 2 process, from the initial assessment through annual SOC 2 Type 2 renewals, adds rigor and consistency to many of the processes and procedures you already have in place. It also helps you identify deficiencies and correct them along the way. You don’t have any deficiencies you say? Well good on you, but keep an open mind as you go through the process—just in case.

Another Beginning

Thanks for joining us as we celebrate our first SOC 2 journey. In the end there was little tomfoolery, no bloodshed, and no one got lost under a mound of paperwork. Hopefully there were a few nuggets of useful information that can help you along the way on your own SOC 2 odyssey. Of course, as this SOC 2 Type 2 journey ends, we start a new one, as each year we will be audited to ensure our continued compliance. Onward.

The post Our Journey to SOC 2 Type 2 Certification appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Taking a company public is an investment. At Backblaze, we spent more than $10 million* in connection with our IPO and learned a lot in the process. Now, all that knowledge is yours for free. Why? We’re open sourcing our IPO.

In the tech world, the open source movement has long promoted growth, innovation, and collaboration. The push to democratize code is such a powerful thing that it is credited with the rapid expansion of technological innovation in recent decades. And yet, while open sourcing is widespread in our industry, you don’t find it in many others.

Some of the most common and repetitive business practices are still not well understood. The IPO process, for example, is as cryptic as the most jealously guarded algorithms for anyone who hasn’t been through it, and for no good reason. Entrepreneurs and business leaders often enter into this process not entirely blind, but without the building blocks those who IPO’d before had constructed. It doesn’t make sense.

When Backblaze went public in 2021, we found ourselves wondering why there wasn’t a better roadmap available to any entrepreneur who dared to take the IPO path. It’s an investment not only of management time, but also a significant amount of financial resources. Having more information going into it is never a bad thing.

Last year, I wrote about why you should go IPO, but in this series what I really want to do is open source our IPO process and share every step along the way: who to talk to, what to chase, what to build. I want any business leader to be able to use this series as a foundation along the journey to IPO. An IPO will still be an investment, but you’ll be armed with the knowledge to make it lean and mean. (And whether you actually go public or not is beside the point—the preparation takes your business to a whole new level.)

The Backblaze Way

In the 20 years leading up to 2021—the year Backblaze was listed—around 4,500 companies went public, and yet there was still no definitive resource for us to follow when we started out. It wasn’t just that the roadmap was unclear, the process was also clouded by perceptions of what type of company could make the journey. The message we frequently heard was that without lots of media buzz, multiple rounds of traditional venture capital (VC) funding, public declarations of money raised, revenue above $100M, and lofty growth metrics, don’t even bother getting started.

But we’d already taken a different route to get where we were, bootstrapping our way to profitability and growth without following the road most traveled and the structure that provides, so we weren’t afraid to do the same thing in an IPO. It created some unique obstacles, but it worked for us, and we hope other entrepreneurs and business leaders can leverage our learnings, avoid our mistakes, and find some of the same benefits we did in going public.

Potential Stumbling Blocks

The road to IPO was something we thought about from day one of our company, but we started moving along it more seriously in early 2020.

We had some excellent advisors and mentors guiding our first steps (and if you’re contemplating an IPO, I highly, highly recommend starting to seek out folks with experience with IPOs who can help guide you along the way). At the same time, I wanted to make sure I was developing my own understanding of the process and forming my own opinions. My research included everything from digging deep into the resources shared by outside counsel to a late night “how to IPO” Google search (with limited results).

So what would have been most helpful to me at the time? What were the gray areas? What resources could have made all the difference at the beginning of the process? Below are the key points that I would give myself if I could go back in time, and they form the backbone of my thinking as I’ve begun to open source our experience for you.

How to IPO: The Things That Should Keep You Up at Night

• The Unicorn CFO: We all know the importance of the CFO in the IPO process, but when the markets are strong and many companies are marching towards a public offering, CFOs with IPO-specific experience are rare. Can we start with a head of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)? A controller? What’s right for our company?
• General Guidance from General Counsel (GC): At the end of 2019, our in-house legal team was essentially nonexistent. We needed to hire a GC to help us navigate many of the nuanced IPO best practices, but where else should they provide guidance? Your GC should instruct you on how to start thinking and acting like a public company and direct your executive team on the specific roles they should play.
• What Is My Role in All of This?: As a CEO, I naturally wanted to have my hands in every part of the IPO process. But, that was impractical and impossible. For example, I needed to play a very specific role as chief executive in the drafting of the S-1. (That’s the document you file with the SEC when you want to go public.) I had to approach the document with company vision/storytelling as my main focus—to ensure the picture we were painting of the company’s future was neither slanted by the desires of the market, nor overshadowed by legal and financial jargon.
• Avoiding Fyre Festival: While on one hand you want to deliver a strong company narrative, many entrepreneurs can get carried away. You want to make sure you’re not telling a story you can’t deliver on. I don’t fault anyone for building a vision, but when thousands of influencers wind up in FEMA tents on a remote Caribbean island, you’ve taken your business narrative too far.
• Systems, Processes, & People: These are the core components necessary to have in place for a successful IPO. When we started having the IPO conversations, ours were sufficient for the operations at a scrappy startup. I thought we had been informally putting the right infrastructure in place as we scaled, but preparing for an IPO takes a more concerted and intentional effort.

The Tip of the Iceberg

What I’ve touched on above is truly just the tip of the iceberg—something to get you thinking. In the rest of this series, I plan to dig deep into the inner workings of the IPO and share my insights—plus, many of the materials, planning docs, decks, spreadsheets, and more—with full transparency.

Here are some of the topics on deck for the rest of the year:

• Building the Foundation: If you want to take your startup public, what’s the best way to set yourself up for success as you grow?
• IPO Readiness: The opportunity stars have aligned. What does it take to actually be ready to take advantage of it?
• Making the Call: When are you ready to pull the trigger and how does your mentality need to change?
• Building the IPO Machine: What cogs are essential for the IPO machine, and how and when do you select them? Think bankers, analysts, executive team members, etc. And what if you pick wrong?
• Storytelling: How to sell success and navigate the S-1.
• Old Friends: Managing morale and focus.
• The Roadshow: Storytelling beyond the S-1: How does it work and how do you prepare?
• Notes on Not Drowning: Testing the waters.
• The Final Steps: What are the final details you need to consider and what could go wrong?
• IPO Day: My experience and key learnings.

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like to learn more about as we help more businesses grow better.

The post Open Sourcing the IPO appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

We took Backblaze public one year ago tomorrow. Our IPO was a great day and the realization of 14 years of hard work by our team. Since then, we’ve executed on our plans, hit our targets, and continued to grow our team and our revenue. And yet, the markets have been tough sledding. For newly-public tech companies like us, as well as many of our peers, stock values have decreased by ~70% from their peak values last year. It’s hard for shareholders, employees, and the market.

Obviously I wish the last 10 months would have gone differently in the markets, who doesn’t? But when people ask me, (which happens a lot) “Do you still think the IPO was a good idea?” There’s no question in my mind that it was one of the best business decisions we’ve made at Backblaze.

In fact, the more that I think about our experience of taking the company public, the more I believe that the IPO should be part of every entrepreneur and business leader’s consideration set. A perception has developed that there are magical financial benchmarks that forbid some companies from listing, but we went public at a point in the evolution of our business when a lot of experts told us we couldn’t. We may have faced some headwinds others didn’t, but I’m convinced that the IPO isn’t just for folks with over $300m in revenue who’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital.

So, in keeping with our commitment to transparency about our business and some of the interesting, tough, and exciting stuff we’ve been through—long-time readers will remember my blog about almost getting acquired—I’ve decided to write about our IPO journey: What sucked, what didn’t, what shocked us, and what we learned. Along the way, I’ll share everything I can—metrics, worksheets, planning decks, and more. Not because I think we deserve a pat on the back or to celebrate what we did, but for two bigger purposes:

1. I can remember what it feels like to be an early stage entrepreneur thinking that the only path to making the company you built successful was to seek out restrictive venture funding or seek out an acquisition. I want to offer folks—whether you’re considering starting a business or have already built one with tens of millions in revenue—that there is another path to consider. While doing an IPO isn’t right for everyone, I think considering an IPO, and positioning your business to go that way if the opportunity arises, is sound strategy.
2. I believe that democratizing the IPO process will be healthier for businesses, markets, and investors. And I’m not the first: Bill Hambrecht is well known for his efforts to open IPOs to broader audiences as he did with companies like Google and Overstock.com. Tech is all about disrupting unnecessary complexity, and going public is more complex than an AWS invoice. In the mid-nineties, there were more than 8,000 publicly traded companies. By this September there were nearly 2,000 fewer companies listed, even after the boom we saw in 2020 and 2021. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Why Listen to Us?

Hot takes on building startups and raising funding are a dime a dozen—so if you’re skeptical, I get it. What we’ll share here is partially based on the experience we had building two prior technology companies, raising multiple rounds of venture capital, and successfully selling them through acquisition. However, more uniquely: We founded and essentially bootstrapped Backblaze all the way up to our IPO (before 2021 we had only taken $3M in outside funding). Even CNBC noted that we took a unique path to market, and yet with $65 million in recurring revenue in 2020, we made a successful public offering and raised over $100M in funding to continue growing our business. We’ve made this journey ourselves, we did it recently, and—in the spirit of transparency—we’re going to share the stories behind it.

Why an IPO Should Be in Your Business Consideration Set

Why should IPO readiness (the process of setting up your business to go public) and actually going public be in your playbook? I’m going to explore this concept deeply over the course of this series, but I’ll pause here to tell you the five most compelling reasons to be IPO ready, along with a few proof points from our own experience.

• Build to Last: Starting and growing a company is hard. If you’re doing it, it’s probably because you’re passionate about solving some problems in the world. To be successful, you had to care about your vision, your product, your customers, and your team. If your company ends up acquired, the unique entity you created will vaporize. Taking your company public provides a path to building and running the company for the long-term, possibly outliving you.
• Funding With the Right Strings Attached: Raising funding in an IPO requires selling a portion of your company, just as in any venture funding. The difference, however, is that in an IPO the equity you sell is common shares—everyone gets the same shares on the same terms. In private fund raises, the company sells “preferred shares” to investors which typically come with a variety of special rights giving investors the ability to have extra control over the company, get extra equity in the company, prevent the company from raising money from other investors, and more. Raising funding in an IPO is the ultimate “clean” fundraise.
• Building a Real Business: If you’re building with an aim to be acquired, it’s nearly impossible to not establish a culture at the company where everyone is focused on “dumping” the business. By aiming for an IPO, it drives the mindset to build for sustainability. You’re more likely to create a business that can achieve profitability, scale, growth, and deliver value over the long haul. Also, going through the actual process of IPO readiness, along with the process of feeding your financials through a meat grinder of ROI modeling and outcome driven planning—both during and after the IPO—means you will position your business for even greater resilience going forward.
• Credibility: When the five Backblaze founders talked about IPOs back in the day in a tiny apartment in Palo Alto, it felt like we were trying on our dad’s pants. Sure, we knew some companies went public—but it didn’t feel like something that was really accessible (even for a room of people that scaled and sold multiple companies). But we’re not the only people who feel this way: “Public” signals a level of accomplishment and evolution that’s hard to achieve as a private company. Being able to achieve an IPO proves a business’s capacity to operate and excel under intense pressure and scrutiny. And if anyone is uncertain about how we’re doing, they can just go grab the last 10-K to see our results.
• Liquidity: This one is simple. If you’re not public, you can’t sell your stock on the open market. Once the company is public, you and your employees (and existing shareholders) can sell their shares if they so choose. It also provides the freedom and flexibility for each individual to make that decision on their own. Rather than having to sell the company (wherein usually everyone is forced to sell all their shares), this allows one person to decide to stay “all-in” and keep all their shares, another one to sell theirs, and a third to sell just a few shares.

What’s Next?

If you’re intrigued, this is really only the tip of the iceberg. In future posts, I will dig into everything from the nitty gritty tactics—like how to build a board, how to build a banking syndicate (twice), and how to write an S-1—to the bigger stories—like how years of planning can hinge on a few hours of work, or why “testing the waters” might be better named “getting thrown to the sharks”.

Rest assured: If you think you’re not interested in going public, everything I share will have as much to do with how you build a better business that you can grow over time as it will with the guts of the IPO process. I hope it’s useful, and if there’s anything you hope I’ll address or anything specific that you’d like to learn more about, let me know in the comments.

The post 5 Compelling Reasons You Should Go IPO appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

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.

The post Stocks & Storage: Demystifying Finance Jargon, One Acronym at a Time appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

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:
  • Backblaze Computer Backup: 3 months of free backup for new and existing customers.
  • Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: A $20 Credit for new and existing customers.
• 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.

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.

The post The (New) Perks of Being A Backblaze Stock Owner appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

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.

The post How Interns Can Help Your Business and the World appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

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. We’re looking forward to helping you store and use your data with astonishing ease now and for whatever comes next.

It’s Time to Blaze On!

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

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:

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.