Today, we announced our new Powered by Backblaze program to give platform providers the ability to offer cloud storage without the burden of building scalable storage infrastructure (something we know a little bit about). 

If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV), technology partner, or any company that wants to incorporate easy, affordable data storage within your branded user experience, Powered by Backblaze will give you the tools to do so without complex code, capital outlay, or massive expense.

Read on to learn more about Powered by Backblaze and how it can help you enhance your platforms and services. Or, if you’d like to get started asap, contact our Sales Team for access.  

Benefits of Powered by Backblaze

• Business Growth: Adding cloud services to your product portfolios can generate new revenue streams and/or grow your existing margin.
• Improved Customer Experience: Take the complexity out of object storage and deliver the best solutions by incorporating a proven object cloud storage solution.
• Simplified Billing: Reduce complex billing by providing customers with a single bill from a single provider. 
• Build Your Brand:  Improve customer expectations by providing cloud storage with your company name for consistency and brand identity.

What Is Powered by Backblaze?

Powered by Backblaze offers companies the ability to incorporate B2 Cloud Storage into their products so they can sell more services or enhance their user experience with no capital investment. Today, this program offers two solutions that support the provisioning of B2 Cloud Storage: Custom Domains and the Backblaze Partner API.

How Can I Leverage Custom Domains?

Custom Domains, launched today, lets you serve content to your end users from the web domain or URL of your choosing, with no need for complex code or proxy servers. Backblaze manages the heavy lifting of cloud storage on the back end.

Custom Domains functionality combines CNAME and Backblaze B2 Object Storage, enabling the use of your preferred domain name in your files’ web domain or URLs instead of using the domain name that Backblaze automatically assigns.

We’ve chosen Backblaze so we can have a reliable partner behind our new Edge Storage solution. With their Custom Domain feature, we can implement the security needed to serve data from Backblaze to end users from Azion’s Edge Platform, improving user experience.

—Rafael Umann, CEO, Azion, a full stack platform for developers

How Can I Leverage the Backblaze Partner API?

The Backblaze Partner API automates the provisioning and management of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage storage accounts within a platform. It allows for managing accounts, running reports, and creating a bundled solution or managed service for a unified user experience.

We wrote more about the Backblaze Partner API here, but briefly: We created this solution by exposing existing API functionality in a manner that allows partners to automate tasks essential to provisioning users with seamless access to storage.

The Backblaze Partner API calls allow you to:

• Create accounts (add Group members)
• Organize accounts in Groups
• List Groups
• List Group members
• Eject Group members

If you’d like to get into the details, you can dig deeper in our technical documentation.

Our customers produce thousands of hours of content daily and, with the shift to leveraging cloud services like ours, they need a place to store both their original and transcoded files. The Backblaze Partner API allows us to expand our cloud services and eliminate complexity for our customers—giving them time to focus on their business needs, while we focus on innovations that drive more value.

—Murad Mordukhay, CEO, Qencode

How to Get Started With Powered by Backblaze

To get started with Powered by Backblaze, contact our Sales Team. They will work with you to understand your use case and how you can best utilize Powered by Backblaze. 

What’s Next?

We’re looking forward to adding more to the Powered by Backblaze program as we continue investing in the tools you need to bring performant cloud storage to your users in an easy, seamless fashion.

The post Object Storage Simplified: Introducing Powered by Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

If you do any kind of video streaming, encoding and storing your data is one of your main challenges. Encoding videos in various formats and resolutions for different devices and platforms can be a resource-intensive task, and setting up and maintaining on-premises encoding infrastructure can be expensive.

Today, we’re excited to announce an expanded partnership with Qencode, a media services platform that enables users to build powerful video solutions, including solutions to the challenges of transcoding, live streaming, and media storage. The expanded partnership embeds the Backblaze Partner API within the Qencode platform, making it frictionless for users to add cloud storage to their media production workflows. 

What Is Qencode?

Qencode is a media services platform founded in 2017 that assists with digital video transformation. The Qencode API provides developers within the over-the-top (OTT), broadcasting, and media & entertainment sectors with scalable and robust APIs for:

• Video transcoding
• Live streaming
• Content delivery
• Media storage
• Artificial intelligence

Qencode + Backblaze

Recognizing the growing demand for integrated and efficient cloud storage within media production, Qencode and Backblaze built an alliance which creates a new paradigm for cutting-edge video APIs fortified by a reliable and efficient cloud storage solution. This integration empowers flexible workflows consisting of uploading, transcoding, storing, and delivering video content for media and OTT companies of all sizes. By integrating the platforms, this partnership provides top-tier features while simplifying the complexities and reducing the risks often associated with innovation.

We want to set new standards for value in an industry that is fragmented and complex. By merging Qencode’s advanced video processing capabilities with Backblaze’s reliable cloud storage, we’re addressing a critical industry need for seamless integration and efficiency. Integrating Backblaze’s Partner API takes our platform to the next level, providing users with a single, streamlined interface for all their video and media needs.

Murad Mordukhay, CEO of Qencode

Qencode + Backblaze Use Cases

The easy-to-use interface and affordability make Qencode an ideal choice for businesses who need video processing at scale without compromising spend or flexibility. Qencode enables businesses of all sizes to customize and control a complete end-to-end solution, from sign-on to billing, which includes seamless access to Backblaze storage through the Qencode software as a service (SaaS) platform. 

Simplifying the User Experience

Expanding this partnership with Qencode takes our API technology a step further in making cloud storage more accessible to businesses whose mission is to simplify user experience. We are excited to work with a specialist like Qencode to bring a simple and low cost storage solution to businesses who need it the most.

The post Backblaze + Qencode: Video Transcoding Made Simple appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Business disruptions can be devastating, as any business owner who has been through one will tell you. This stat isn’t meant to stoke fear, but the Atlas VPN research team found that 31% of businesses in the U.S. are forced to close for a period of time as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks.

It’s likely some, if not most, of those businesses had backups in place. But, having backups alone won’t necessarily save your business if it takes you days or weeks to restore operations from those backups. And true disaster recovery means more than simply having backups and a plan to restore: It means testing that plan regularly to make sure you can bring your business back online.

Today, we’re sharing news of a new disaster recovery service built on Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage that’s aimed to help businesses restore faster and more affordably: Continuity Centers’ Cloud Instant Backup Recovery (Cloud IBR) which instantly recovers Veeam backups from the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud.

Helping Businesses Recover After a Disaster

We launched the first generation version of this solution—Instant Recovery in Any Cloud—in May of 2022 to help businesses complete their disaster recovery playbook. And now, we’re building on that original infrastructure as code (IaC) package, to bring you Cloud IBR.

Cloud IBR is a second generation solution that further simplifies disaster recovery plans. The easy-to-use interface and affordability make Cloud IBR an ideal disaster recovery solution designed for small and medium size businesses (SMBs) who are typically priced out of enterprise-scale disaster recovery solutions.

How Does Cloud IBR Work?

Continuity Centers combines the automation-driven Veeam REST API calls with phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud platform into a unified system, and completely streamlines the user experience.

The fully-automated service deploys a recovery process through a simple web UI, and, in the background, uses phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud servers to import Veeam backups stored in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and fully restores the customer’s server infrastructure. The solution hides the complexity of dealing with automation scripts and APIs and offers a simple interface to stand up an entire cloud infrastructure when you need it. Best of all, you pay for the service only for the period of time that you need.

Cloud IBR gives small and mid-market companies the highest level of business continuity available, against disasters of all types. It’s a simple and accessible solution for SMBs to embrace. We developed this solution with affordability and availability in mind, so that businesses of all sizes can benefit from our decades of disaster recovery experience, which is often financially out of reach for the SMB.

—Gregory Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers.

Right-Sized Disaster Recovery

Previously, mid-market businesses were underserved by disaster recovery and business continuity planning because the requirements and efforts to create a disaster recovery (DR) plan are often foregone in favor of more immediate business demands. Additionally, many disaster recovery solutions are designed for larger size companies and do not meet the specific needs for SMBs. Cloud IBR allows businesses of all sizes to instantly stand up their entire server infrastructure in the cloud, at a moment’s notice and with a single click, making it easy to plan for and easy to execute.

Learn more about Cloud IBR at the Cloud IBR website.

The post Announcing Instant Backup Recovery, a Joint Solution by Continuity Centers appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

As the leading specialized storage cloud platform, Backblaze is a big proponent of the open, collaborative nature of independent cloud service providers. From our participation in the Bandwidth Alliance to our large ecosystem of partners, we’re focused on what we call “Phase Three” of the cloud. What’s happening in Phase Three? The age of walled gardens, hidden fees, and out of control egress fees driven by the hyperscalers is in the past. Today’s specialized cloud solutions are oriented toward what’s best for users—an open, multi-cloud internet.

Which is why I’m particularly happy to announce today that we’ve joined the CDN Alliance, a nonprofit organization and community of industry leaders focused on ensuring that the content delivery network (CDN) industry is evolving in a way that best serves businesses distributing content of every type around the world—from streaming media to stock image resources to e-commerce and more.

The majority of the content we consume today on our many devices and platforms is being delivered through a CDN. Being part of the CDN Alliance allows Backblaze to collaborate and drive innovation with our peers to ensure that everyone’s content experience only gets better.

Through participation in and sponsorships of joint events, panels, and gatherings, we look forward to working with the CDN Alliance on the key challenges facing the industry, including availability, scalability, reliability, privacy, security, sustainability, interoperability, education, certification, regulations, and numerous others. Check out the CDN Alliance and its CDN Community for more info.

The post Backblaze Joins the CDN Alliance appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

We launched our Channel Partner program about seven months ago. In the time since, we’ve rapidly onboarded some great strategic resellers, added new benefits, welcomed more staff to our team, and completed our initial launch of Backblaze B2 Reserve—our capacity-based cloud storage offering that waives download fees, offers premium support, and features our Universal Data Migration service—but we’re still just getting started.

We’re very excited to announce another partner today.

Exertis Broadcast + Backblaze

Exertis Broadcast now offers resellers the full value and benefits of our Backblaze B2 Reserve program. This new partnership is doubly exciting to us because a number of our alliance partners already work with Exertis Broadcast—including Quantum, Studio Network Solutions (SNS), and SoDA—which means the world class Exertis engineers can package a suite of best-in-breed cloud workflow solutions in one seamless package for teams working in media and entertainment, modern data protection, and/or disaster recovery solutions industries.

If you’re a reseller looking for a distribution partner that can help your customers with their cloud storage needs, here are a few of the benefits Exertis offers:

• Sales and Support dedicated to customer success.
• Engineering Team available to consult on the best products and solutions to fit any needs.
• Tools and Resources ranging from a state-of-the-art demo center to an innovative video solution builder.
• Video Production to create cutting-edge content.
• Marketing Professionals to design effective marketing content to keep you abreast of industry news and events.

To get started, resellers can contact us at channelsales@backblaze.com today.

The Backblaze Channel Partner Program

The Channel Partner program exists to provide easy, transparent, predictable cloud storage solutions to accelerate growth for resellers through the value of our Backblaze B2 Reserve offering.

The program provides benefits ranging from deal registration to joint marketing; rewards like seller incentives and market development funds (coming soon); as well as support including a Partner Portal and sales and marketing staff assistance.

Join Us!

We can’t wait to join with our current and future Channel Partners to deliver tomorrow’s solutions to any customer who can use astonishingly easy cloud storage. (We think that’s pretty much everybody.)

If you’re a reseller, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re a customer interested in benefiting from any of the above, we’d love to connect you with the right team to serve your needs. Either way, the doors are open and we look forward to helping out.

The post Widening the Channel: Exertis Broadcast Adds Backblaze B2 Reserve appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Streamlining your digital media workflow can make all the difference when it comes to your productivity—not to mention your budget. For folks in media, entertainment, post-production, corporate, education, government, or content creation, media workflows just got a little easier thanks to a partnership between Backblaze and Telestream.

Now joint customers can store transcoded media files on Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as their origin store for delivery via Telestream’s Vantage CloudPort product. Read on to learn more about the partnership and what it means for you.

What Does Telestream Do?

Telestream, a Backblaze alliance partner, specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience regardless of how it is created, distributed, or viewed. Throughout the entire digital media lifecycle, from capture to viewing, for consumers through high-end professionals, Telestream products range from desktop components and cross-platform applications to fully-automated, enterprise-class digital media transcoding, and workflow systems. Telestream enables users in a broad range of business environments to leverage the value of their video content.

How Does This Partnership Benefit Joint Customers?

Content is king, as they say, and being able to efficiently and effectively produce content and make it available to the audiences that are going to consume it is critical. This partnership benefits joint customers in a few key ways:

• Customers can benefit from cost savings in the cloud: Backblaze is a fraction of the cost of diversified cloud providers.
• By storing transcoded media files in the cloud, customers can leverage other services like QC in the cloud to ensure quality is up to their high standards.
• Customers can leave on-premises storage in the past and move to the cloud to leverage the cloud’s infinite scalability and parallelism.
• Making the move to the cloud also reduces the risk of having a single point of failure on premises.

“Telestream and Backblaze are driven by a shared mission to empower our customers and help them make their businesses more efficient. With this collaboration, we can meet our customers where their content is stored and apply Telestream’s best in class media processing tools.”
—Tim MacGregor, Senior Director, Head of Strategy and Product Development, Telestream Cloud

Getting Started With Backblaze B2 and Telestream

Ready to do more with your data affordably? Check out the Telestream documentation for connecting storage via the generic S3 protocol, and contact our Sales team today to get started.

The post Automate Your Digital Media Workflows with Backblaze and Telestream appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Support from our partners is part of what makes Backblaze so easy to use for so many folks, and today we’re continuing our efforts to make working with us even easier with the launch of our new Partner Program.

For businesses, it cuts through the complexity and cost that may have stopped them from adopting cloud storage and backup. For partners—including resellers, integrators, managed service providers, and more—it boosts their array of cloud solutions and brings even more value to their clients. The program builds on our long commitment to develop new solutions for partners and help them grow their businesses.

Partner Program Offerings

The program provides new opportunities for four key partner groups: Channel Partners, Technology Partners, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Affiliates.

As part of this new program, Channel Partners can take advantage of special capacity-based pricing with B2 Reserve, as well as a self-service resource providing discounts, deal registration, and in-house support. It also offers training and education resources.

Technology Partners can enjoy complimentary solution expertise and joint go-to-market and co-branding opportunities. MSPs will notice the ease of the new admin console and the utility of in-house support, digital assets, training materials, and data sheets, not to mention the recurring 10% commissions on computer backup. And of course, Affiliates, too, can enjoy recurring 10% commissions.

With the launch of the program, Backblaze is doubling down on its commitment to its partners, proving why Backblaze has built its reputation on easy-to-use, affordable cloud storage.

“Ease of use and accessibility can have a significant impact for our partners and their business. We are continuously looking for ways to innovate and develop for our partners. Offering this easy, accessible, and efficient resource will strengthen our relationship with our customers.”
—Nilay Patel, Vice President of Sales, Backblaze

Visit our Partner page to learn more about the Partner Program, visit the Partner Portal, or get started as a new partner.

The post Backblaze Launches Comprehensive Partner Program appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

If you’re in charge of IT for a public sector entity, you know the budgeting and procurement process doesn’t lend itself well to buying cloud services. But, today, the life of a public sector CIO just got a whole lot easier. Through a new partnership with Carahsoft, public sector customers can now leverage their existing state, local, and federal buying programs to access Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

We’re not the only cloud storage provider available through Carahsoft, the Master Government Aggregator for the IT industry, but we are the easy, affordable, trusted solution among providers in their ecosystem. Read on to learn more about the partnership.

The Right Cloud Solution at the Right Time

For state and local governments, federal agencies, healthcare providers, and higher education institutions, the pandemic introduced challenges that required cloud scalability—remote work and increased demand for public services, to name two. But due to procurement procedures and budgeting incompatibility, adopting the cloud isn’t always a smooth process for the public sector.

The public sector typically uses a CapEx model to budget for IT services. The cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model can be at odds with this budgeting method. Public sector CIOs are also typically required to use established buying programs to purchase services, which many cloud providers are not a part of.

Further, recent research shows that while public sector cloud adoption has increased, a “budget snapback” driven by return to office IT expenses is prompting CIOs in this field to optimize their cloud spend. Public sector institutions are seeking additional value in their cloud budgets, and clamoring for a way to purchase those services through existing programs and channels.

“Public sector decision-makers reference budget, pricing models, and transparency as their biggest barriers to cloud adoption. That’s why this partnership is so exciting: Our services come at a fraction of the price of other options, and we’ve long been known for our transparent, trusted approach to working with customers.”
—Nilay Patel, VP of Sales, Backblaze

Bringing Capacity-based Cloud Services to the Public Sector

Backblaze, through the partnership with Carahsoft—which was enabled by our recent launch of a capacity-based pricing bundle, Backblaze B2 Reserve—solves both the budgeting and procurement challenges public sector CIOs are facing.

The partnership brings Backblaze services to state, local, and federal buying programs in a model they prefer at a fraction of the price of traditional cloud storage providers. It’s an affordable, easy solution for public sector CIOs seeking to optimize cloud spend in the wake of the pandemic.

“Backblaze’s ease of use, affordability, and transparency are just some of the major advantages of their robust cloud backup and storage services. We look forward to working with Backblaze and our reseller partners to help agencies better protect and secure their business data.”
—Evan Slack, Director of Sales for Emerging Cloud and Virtualization Technologies, Carahsoft

About Carahsoft

Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, supporting public sector organizations across federal, state, and local government agencies and education and healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator® for vendor partners, Carahsoft delivers solutions for cybersecurity, multi-cloud, DevSecOps, big data, artificial intelligence, open-source, customer experience, and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators, and consultants, Carahsoft’s sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services, and training through hundreds of contract vehicles.

About Backblaze B2 Reserve

Backblaze B2 Reserve packages cloud storage in a capacity-based bundle with an annualized SKU which works seamlessly with channel billing models. The offering also provides seller incentives, Tera-grade support, and expanded migration services to empower the channel’s acceleration of cloud storage adoption and revenue growth. Customers can purchase Backblaze B2 through channel partners, starting at 20TB.

How to Get Started With Backblaze B2 and Carahsoft

For resellers interested in offering Backblaze services, it is business as usual if you currently have an account with Carahsoft. Those with immediate quote requests should email partnerships@backblaze.com for further details. For any resellers who do not have an account with Carahsoft and would like the ability to sell Backblaze services, follow this link to create a Carahsoft account.

The post Backblaze and Carahsoft Help Public Sector CIOs Optimize Cloud Spend appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Since the early days of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, the advocacy that resellers and distributors have carried out in support of our products has been super important for us. Today, we can start to more fully return the favor: We are excited to announce the launch of our Channel Partner program.

In this program, we commit to delivering greater ease, transparency, and predictability to our Channel Partners through a suite of tools, resources, incentives, and benefits which will roll out over the balance of 2022. We’ve included the details below.

“When Backblaze expressed interest in working with CloudBlue Marketplace, we were excited to bring them into the fold. Their ease-of-use and affordable price point make them a great offering to our existing resellers, especially those in the traditional IT, MSP, and media & entertainment space.”
—Jess Warrington, General Manager, North America at CloudBlue

The Program’s Mission

This new program is designed to offer a simple and streamlined way for Channel Partners to do business with Backblaze. In this program, we are committed to three principles:

Ease

We’ll work consistently to simplify the way partners can do business with Backblaze, from recruitment to onboarding, and engagement to deal close. Work can be hard enough, we want work with us to feel easy.

Transparency

Openness and honesty are central to Backblaze’s business, and they will be in our dealings with partners as well. As we evolve the program, we’ll share our experiences and thoughts early and often, and we’ll encourage feedback and keep our doors open to your thoughts to inform how we can continue to improve the Channel Partner experience.

Predictability

Maintaining predictable pricing and a scalable capacity model for our resellers and distributors is central to this effort. We’ll also increasingly bundle additional features to answer all your customers’ cloud needs.

The Program’s Value

Making these new investments in our Channel Partner program is all about opening up the value of B2 Cloud Storage to more businesses. To achieve that, our team will help you to engage more customers, help those customers to build their businesses and accelerate their growth, and ultimately increase your profits.

Engage

Backblaze will drive joint marketing activities, provide co-branded collateral, and establish market development funds to drive demand.

Build

Any technology that supports S3-compatible storage can be paired with B2 Cloud Storage, and we continue to expand our Alliance Partner ecosystem—this means you can sell the industry-leading solutions your customers prefer paired with Backblaze B2.

Accelerate

Our products are differentiated by their ease of adoption and use, meaning they’ll be easy to serve to your customers for any use case: backup, archive or any object storage use case, and more—growing your topline revenue.

The Details

To deliver on the mission this program is aligned around, and the value it aims to deliver, our team has developed a collection of benefits, rewards, and resources. Many of these are available today, and some will come later this year (which we’ll clarify below). Importantly, we want to emphasize that this is just the beginning, and we will work to add to each of these lists over the coming months and years.

Benefits:

• Deal registration.
• Channel-exclusive product: Backblaze B2 Reserve.
• Logo promotion on www.backblaze.com.
• Joint marketing activities.

Rewards:

• Rebates.
• Seller incentives.
• Market development funds (coming soon).

Resources:

• Partner sales manager to help with onboarding, engagement, and deal close.
• Partner marketing manager to help with joint messaging, go-to-market, and collateral.
• A password-protected partner portal (coming soon).
• Automation of deal registration, lead passing, and seller incentive payments.

Join Us!

We can’t wait to join with our current and future Channel Partners to deliver tomorrow’s solutions to any customer who can use astonishingly easy cloud storage! (We think that’s pretty much everybody.)

If you’re a reseller or distributor, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re a customer interested in benefiting from any of the above, we’d love to connect you with the right Channel Partner team to serve your needs. Either way, the doors are open and we look forward to helping out.

The post Channel Partner Program Launch: Ease, Transparency, and Predictability for the Channel appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.