Writing a “year in review” for 2020 feels more than a little challenging. After all, it’s the first year in memory that became its own descriptor: The phrase “because 2020” has become the lead in or blanket explanation for just about any news story we never could have predicted at the beginning of this year.
And yet, looking forward to 2021, I can’t help but feel hopeful when I think about what we did with these hard times. Families rediscovered ways to stay connected and celebrate, neighbors and communities strengthened their bonds and their empathy for one another, and all sorts of businesses and organizations reached well beyond any idea of normal operations to provide services and support despite wild headwinds. Healthcare professionals, grocery stores, poll workers, restaurants, teachers—the creativity and resilience shown in all they’ve accomplished in a matter of months is humbling. If we can do all of this and more in a year of unprecedented challenges, imagine what we can do when we’re no longer held back by a global pandemic?
Looking closer to home, at the Backblaze community—some 190 employees, as well as their families and pets, and our hundreds of thousands of customers and partners around the world—I’m similarly hopeful. In the grand scheme of the pandemic, we were lucky. Most of our work, our services, and our customers’ work, can be accomplished remotely. And yet, I can’t help but be inspired by the stories from this year.
There were Andrew Davis and Alex Acosta, two-thirds of the IT operations team at Gladstone Institutes—a leader in biomedical research that rapidly shifted many of its labs’ focus this year to studying the virus that causes COVID-19. After realizing their data was vulnerable, these two worked with our team to move petabytes of data off of tape and into the cloud, protecting all of it from ransomware and data loss.
And then there were Cédric Pierre-Louis, Director of Programming for the African Fiction Channels at THEMA, and Gareth Howells, Director of Out Point Media, who worked with our friends at iconik to make collaboration and storytelling easier across the African Fiction Channels at THEMA—a Canal+ Group company that has more than 180 television channels in its portfolio. The creative collaboration that goes into TV might not rival the life-saving potential of Gladstone’s work, but I think everyone needed to escape through the power of media at some point this year.
And if you had told me on March 7th—the day after we made the decision to shift Backblaze to mostly 100% work from home status until the COVID-19 situation resolved—that the majority of our team would work for 10 more months (and counting) from our kitchens and attics and garages…and that we’d still launch the Backblaze S3 Compatible API, clear an exabyte of data under management, enable Cloud to Cloud Migration, and announce so many other solutions and partnerships, I’m not sure which part would have been harder to believe. But during a year when cloud storage and computer backup became increasingly important for businesses and individuals, I’m truly proud of the way our team stepped up to support and serve our customers.
These are just a sampling of the hopeful stories from our year. There’s no question that there are still challenges in our future, but tallying what we’ve been able to achieve while our Wi-Fi cut in and out, our pets and children rampaged through the house, while we swapped hard drives while masked and six feet distant from our coworkers, there’s little question in my mind that we can meet them. Until then, thanks for your good work, your business, and sticking with us, together, while apart.
