HubStor
A New Approach to Hybrid Cloud Storage

As terabytes of data continue to mount, security threats like ransomware are a bigger threat, driving many companies to adopt cloud storage to archive and protect data. However, despite the advantages, most firms find the functionality of hybrid cloud solutions extremely limited. HubStor, the first data-aware hybrid cloud storage solution, has often witnessed, “IT leaders feeling disenfranchised after trying out cloud storage gateways,” says Geoff Bourgeois, Co-Founder and CEO, HubStor. “The appliance cloud gateways are expensive and do not integrate with their current storage investments. There is also a complete lack of search and data governance.”

HubStor’s approach enables clients to transform their existing file servers into cloud gateways that they control with policies, and it works without disrupting users or applications. “In the cloud, instead of just storage, we wrap data, access rights, and activities with analytics, auditing, search, and a near real-time policy engine to empower our clients with wide-ranging visibility and control to manage their information,” he adds.

In one instance, a medical device technology company approached HubStor to address their quandaries. The customer conducts clinical trials and needs to store large datasets with 10 year retention. They were growing at two terabytes a month and didn’t want to have to buy new hardware. “HubStor was able to give them a solution that added the ability to use policies and move that data into the cloud in a secure way, while automatically synchronizing permissions and cleaning up the data in the old storage,” Bourgeois adds. The customer realized a 60 percent reduction in their storage footprint with HubStor’s deduplication and compression.

HubStor clients only pay for what they use; every customer is given their own tenant in the cloud and can choose additional services including analytics, auditing, and search. Pricing is based off usage of cloud infrastructure. “We make this fully transparent to each customer and our clients like it because they are paying precisely for what they use. We can scale it up and scale it down based on their needs, and there isn’t licensing, term commitments, or cancellation fees.

We are the only ‘data-aware’ cloud storage that automatically generates analytics on a near real-time basis so that customers can visualize and manage what they have in the cloud

It’s a very fair and transparent model,” explains Bourgeois.

The flagship service of HubStor revolves around its “data aware” storage. “We are the only ‘data-aware’ cloud storage that automatically generates analytics on a near real-time basis so that customers can visualize and manage what they have in the cloud. Moreover, we do this at scale, even for HubStor tenants that span multiple Azure data center regions with billions of objects in storage,” Bourgeois says.

When the data is in the cloud, HubStor has its own set of use cases, primarily in the realm of enterprise scenarios for access governance, data governance, or discovery search. “Sometimes companies want to go beyond that. And when they do, we are able to tie in other services that access HubStor data in a secure fashion. This includes cutting-edge analysis of video data in the cloud using Microsoft Media Analytics with optical character recognition, face emotion recognition, action isolation, and speech-to-text,” extols Bourgeois.

Since June, HubStor began serving enterprise clients from Azure datacenter regions located around the globe, have since expanded the team, launched a channel partner program, and also joined the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Alliance.

HubStor has global plans but also sensible ideas about growth. “We’re a small team here, and based on our experience, we’ve seen how software companies can expand too fast or in ways that ultimately slow them down and hinder their creativity, and stretch the product quality,” Bourgeois concludes.