Storj Accelerates Growth of Cloud Object Storage

Storj Labs, Inc., announced accelerated growth of its cloud object storage solution, which is positioned to transform the storage landscape in 2024.

Partnerships, organic growth and values-based initiatives continue solidifying firm’s position in tech innovation, policy and stewardship.

CEO Ben Golub says: “I’m proud to see rising confidence and reliance on Storj. Our customer data more than doubled in 2023, performance doubled, and we have billions of objects stored on our network in tens of billions of pieces distributed over tens of thousands of nodes surpassing 25PB of customer data in 2023. With petabyte scale customers including major production studios, healthcare companies, and telecommunication leaders, we’re well positioned and are expanding our network of partners, MSPs, VARs and enterprise customers.“

Growth and Validation
90% of the world’s data was generated in the last 2 years and cloud storage is a $100 billion market, growing to $480 billion by 2030, largely propelled by video, scientific/healthcare data and AI. Core strengths of Storj’s are managing the very large files these sectors rely on and delivering S3-compatible, enterprise grade, cloud object storage, often 2-3x faster at  1/10 the cost and 1/10 the carbon footprint of AWS.

The company achieved 226% y/y revenue growth in 2023 proliferating a smarter approach than first-gen hyperscalers burdened by resource-heavy data-centers. It handles terabyte files, while AWS Cloudfront is limited to 30GB, for example. Its infrastructure, providing infinite scalability and environmental sustainability, is a timely combination.

The company developed partnerships with 30 tech alliance partners and 15 resellers in 2023 including Adobe Premiere Pro for media professionals, Acronis for secure backups, MASV for high-performance video teams, Livepeer for live and on-demand video and GB  Labs for fast media sharing. It also became SmartStore certified with Splunk.

It was the first distributed cloud storage provider featured in Forrester’s Object Storage Landscape report in 2Q23, affirming Storj’s approach: “will disrupt centralized object storage providers as computing shifts to the edge.” It also won a 2023 NAB Show Product of the Year Award in the Cloud Computing and Storage category.

Sustainability and Savings
Storj published a 2023 whitepaper revealing that distributed cloud storage reduces carbon emissions by up to 83%. Because the average rate of server utilization is only 12-18% of capacity, it uses existing capacity for its architecture, eliminating the need to build, cool and maintain new drives and data centers. Along with sustainability, this affords Storj a pricing advantage and avoids supply chain challenges, even for multi-petabyte storage.

Enterprises adopt green technologies if they’re the best business decision, and the vendor offers a lower carbon approach that’s more efficient, performant, secure and cost-effective. By 2040, energy required to store digital data could be responsible for 14% of the world’s emissions – about the same as all carbon the US emits. In response, in 2023, Storj co-founded the Digital Sustainability Alliance (DSA) with AdSignal, Valdi and Earthshot to advance solutions that deliver major environmental sustainability impact.

Golub addressed members of the UK House of Commons at the Parliamentary Digital Economy Summit in November 2023, regarding sustainable cloud storage and the DSA participated at the 2024 COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, speaking about digital sustainability and AI.

Security & Compliance
Instead of storing data on data centers that are vulnerable to outages and attacks, the company encrypts and splits data across its zero-trust network to protect vs. outages, ransomware, and compromise, eliminating single points of failure while delivering speed, reliability, security, and global accessibility. It has presented at all of the Institute for Security & Technology’s Ransomware Task Force conferences.

The 2023 launch of Storj Select added facilities with SOC2 certifications to meet needs of large enterprises in industries like healthcare and finance with rigorous security and compliance demands. With petabytes of healthcare data, healthcare data security leader CloudWave, is leveraging Storj Select.

“We work with 300+ hospitals across 6 countries to protect patient data from cyberattacks and ensure performance and reliability,” said Matt Donahue, CloudWave CTO. “Storj Select’s compliance features, speed and security fit well with our cloud strategy.“

Transparency and Outlook
The firm is positioned with strong financials, solid governance, an experienced team and $75M+ in assets, positioning for a landmark year in 2024. It makes live statistics on the state of its network available, publishes annual data on their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and environmental sustainability initiatives, is built on open source code, maintains an open roadmap and shares live network statistics.

Golub shared: “The market is evolving from old-guard titans to a new generation of business and technology leaders that value innovation and transparency to position themselves for exciting growth in 2024 and beyond.”