HubStor Inc: An exceptional cloud computing approach to an old problem: archiving and data protection

Cloud computing adoption inenterprise IT is on the risebecause of its convenience and for some use cases, the low-costeconomics it offers over traditionaldatacenter operations. 

Many organizations are transforminghow they deliver, manage, and protectkey workloads using public cloud infrastructure services. According tocustomer-funded SaaS startupHubStor, it is archiving workloads that are the ‘killer’ use case for the cloud.

Recognized as the world’s first dataaware cloud archive, HubStor wasfounded by Geoff Bourgeois and Greg Campbell in the year 2015 with thegoal of redefining how companies canarchive their data using Microsoft Azure.

Archiving continues to be a strategiccapability for many organizations for multiple reasons. Legal and regulatory compliance requirements are oftenprimary drivers for an archive, while backup, storage growth, and datasecurity are IT concerns that alsobenefit from archiving. 

A problem for archiving on-premises has been the high cost and complexity associated with archive software andsystems. Organizations spend vast amounts of time and money maintaining the hardware, storage, and software of their archive, and then often experience difficulty with it at scale. Before HubStor, there has not been a way to leverage public cloud computing infrastructure to solve thearchiving need.

Difficulty using the cloud for archiving might seem odd since Gartner forecasts the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)market to grow 36.8 percent in 2017 to reach $34.6 billion. However, the truth is that many companies are struggling with how they can use cloud computing infrastructure for archiving because the solution is more than infrastructure. 

Since launching the HubStor service in June 2016, HubStor sees steady adoption of its technology in Europe and North America across a wide variety of industries, including publishers, media companies, construction and engineering services, financial services, medical andhealthcare, and government. 

Several HubStor clients are now over 250 terabytes in their archive. HubStor signed its first client in August 2016, just two months after launching the service. Since then, they have been adding new customers monthly and seeing a 40% month over month growth in revenues. HubStor pulls together cloud computing services with it dataaware object storage fabric which is run exclusively in Microsoft Azure. HubStor integrates with Azure Active Directory and includes installable software for snapshots, policy-driven archiving, recovery, and local caching with existing on-premises storage arrays. 

HubStor stands apart from traditional archiving designs and cloud storage gateway vendors in several distinct ways. Chief among them is its concept of data-aware cloud storage architecture that provides built-in analytics and makes the cloud storage, access rights, and user activities query-ready at scale. 

The query layer supports data governance policies, compliance features, and near real-time security rules in the cloud. Privileged users can manage data retention, classification, access rights, litigation hold, and chargeback without ever having to manage the servers,storage, or software. 

Further differentiating itself,  HubStor has a bold commercial model that does not lock customers into the service. With no entry cost, clients enjoy a monthly subscription where they can cancel at any time and pay only for what they use based on metered usage of the cloud. Unlike other archives, HubStor also makes it easy for IT administrators to securely recover and export data so that clients are never technically locked.

According to HubStor founders, their fresh approach has reinvented archiving for the public cloud era. Clients have the option of running the service fully managed in their Azure account or HubStor’s. Since launching, HubStor continues to innovate aggressively on the development roadmap. So far in 2017, new features have been added for ransomware recovery, drive shipping, SMTP journaling, and event-based retention. HubStor has also made investments for clients needing regulatory compliance with SEC/FINRA, CFTC, FDA, HIPAA, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Forsee the future with HubStor

“In the next few years, we expect to emerge as the leading cloud archive and data protection vendor,” says CEO, Geoff Bourgeois. HubStor is clearly on a path to making a name for itself in cloud computing. Solving significant problems for enterprise IT in valuable new ways in the cloud is a recipe for success.

Meet the Founding Partners 

Geoff Bourgeois is the CEO at HubStor. An enterprise software  entrepreneur, he is passionate about working with customers to drive innovation and deliver lasting value. Mr. Bourgeois is responsible for HubStor’s overall strategic direction, partnerships, execution, and growth. 

Mr. Bourgeois started his career in sales and helped to pioneer one of the first email archiving solutions. He has worked in product management, engineering, sales, and marketing roles at firms like Iron Mountain, Acaveo,Autonomy, Mimosa Systems, and ZANTAZ.

Greg Campbell is the CTO at HubStor. An accomplished architect and developer of enterprise software, he is responsible for leading HubStor’sproduct strategy, architecture, development, and customer experience. Prior to co-founding HubStor, Mr. Campbell co-invented, developed, and launched several leading software products in the areas of eDiscovery, file analysis, content archiving, search, and data migration. 

Mr. Campbell is known for his unique ability to architect scalable enterprise software solutions that he then has a close hand in delivering with highdegrees of quality and performance.

“HubStor provides a new approach to archiving that is purpose built for enterprises that want the convenience of public cloud computing with the security and control of private cloud.”

Get in touch- www.hubstor.net