Over the last f
ew months I have been traveling around the USA and visiting with many of our international customers. Our customers seem to be concerned about three main issues: storage security on cloud providers, how to manage their growing storage costs, and the known and unknowns about Blockchain enabled storage and Bitcoin transactions storage and what it all means. Recently, I went to dinner during the SEG Houston trade show with a few of our customers who are dealing with these three issues and trying to figure out how to prioritize the concerns so their staffs can handle the upcoming developments as they unfold.
Cloud storage is vulnerable storage
As we sat down to dinner in a very good Houston Steak House there was a lot of joking and catching up since it has been about a year since we all last got together. Everyone’s network has gotten more complex, and they all were concerned about their internal security issues. Everyone seems to have instituted some sort of Monthly Security audit and now keeps a record of software updates and patches. One thing that we all noticed was that there really is no good way of auditing the Cloud providers and we have all read articles about how one rogue employee can take down a system, or even the President’s Twitter account. The business man in me forced me to tell them that SimplStor is price competitive with Cloud storage and the restore is a lot quicker. Since I was paying for dinner I got a lot of polite comments, but a few of our guests really see the value of moving data to their own secure environments instead of keeping it on the honeypots of the big cloud storage providers.
Frustrated by Hardware and Software Vendor Pricing Models
The appetizers were delicious and the steaks that came out were large and perfectly cooked. There would be some loosening of belts after this meal. The conversation as we ate our entrees switched to the costs of hardware, software and support from NetApp and EMC. Most of our customers are very satisfied with the reliability of their hardware, but they all wanted a little tweak for this or that reason, and they would like to unbundle the software packages their vendors’ require them to purchase. Everyone agreed the meal was delicious, and that they are paying too much for software they never use. Although frustrated by their software and hardware vendors they all agreed that a good Scotch would make them feel a lot better.
Blockchain and Bitcoin Storage Concerns
As the plates were cleared and the scotch and desert orders were put in someone asked the waiter if they took BitCoin. This led to a conversation about Blockchain enabled storage and the future of business contracts and financial transactions. Perhaps it was the mixing of the wine before dinner and the great meal and the scotch after dinner, but no one was clear on where the Blockchain and Bitcoin evolution would go, but all agreed it was going to have an impact on their need for secure storage on site. We had a great time, and most of us decided to have another scotch before we left and promised each other that we would get together again next year.
We’ll be hosting dinners like this at other trade shows in 2018 and we hope you will join us. We will post the dates and trade shows we will be attending as the year unfolds. If you want to contact us about your storage needs with a time/date to arrange a conference call with you and your team please click on the link.
