We live in a time when building a location-independent business—once considered a luxury—has become a near necessity. It allows more flexibility for modern teams, but most vitally it provides for future scenarios that might require remote work.
Our team recently had the opportunity to sit down with one founder who knew that a remote workforce was essential to his success. Here’s how his early challenges with cloud storage were solved thanks to one surprising conversation.
The Right Conversation at the Right Time
Thanks to his experience developing countless proposals and sales decks for companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, Tristan Pelligrino, Co-founder of Motion—a B2B agency—knows just how difficult it can be to articulate the value of technology. This understanding is what drove Pellegrino and Justin Brown to found Motion. They knew they could help companies solve the challenge of communicating their value through the development of thought-leadership programs that establish authority and speak directly to their ideal customers.
As proof-of-concept for Motion’s consulting approach of initiating the right conversations at the right time, Pelligrino hosts a podcast called “Tech Qualified,” where the Motion team interviews real-world experts to provide tech marketers with best practices and solutions for B2B marketing challenges. These interviews were almost entirely informational or educational for the audience, until one guest turned the tables and introduced Pelligrino to a solution that solved his cloud storage headaches.
Small Frustrations Add Up to a Big Waste
Early on in building the consultancy, Pelligrino implemented Amazon S3 as Motion’s storage and backup provider. The service helped him grow his business to where it is today, with a workforce distributed across the globe and more than 300 clients. But the flexibility it offered came at a high price to his budget and his schedule.
Pelligrino sometimes spent up to an hour in S3 just to set up a new user. It wasn’t clear how to create read-only users, change security settings, or even share files with clients. “It felt like I was recreating the wheel every time I set up a new user experience,” Pelligrino said. He eventually figured it out, but only after combing through the knowledge base to find answers to what he felt were simple questions.
Meanwhile, he was also paying high fees to store his data in S3. He knew that S3 had different tiers of storage that could lower his monthly costs, but figuring out how to move files to another tier seemed more time-consuming than it was worth in cost savings.
These were the headaches Pelligrino was juggling when he reached out to Backblaze’s VP of Marketing, Ahin Thomas, to feature him on the “Tech Qualified” podcast. The plan was to have a discussion about how Backblaze has taken an unconventional approach to standing up to its competitors. But as Pelligrino heard Thomas describe Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s ideal customer profile, he realized that Motion was a perfect fit. Since Backblaze B2 is a pay-as-you-go service with no upload fees, no deletion fees, no minimum data size requirements, and a one-hour minimum retention period, it offered an easier, more cost-efficient solution than what he had experienced with S3.
Cloud to Cloud Transfers Are Easier Than You Think
And yet, while Backblaze B2 seemed perfect, the prospect of moving files to a different provider also seemed impossible. Pelligrino was concerned that files could fail to transfer, that he could experience pipeline failures, or that the files could get corrupted during the process. How would this impact his team, or his customers? Beyond logistical concerns, there was the question of the amount of time it would take and the punitive fees he would be charged for egress from Amazon.
But when he engaged with the solutions engineers at Backblaze, Pellegrino was assured that work and expense wouldn’t fall on his team—Flexify.IO, a Backblaze partner, would make the process easy. Flexify.IO uses cloud internet connections rather than clients’ local internet bandwidth to achieve amazingly fast migrations. Motion’s many terabytes of data quickly moved over to their new B2 Cloud Storage account.
All Pelligrino had to do was to double check that all the files transferred, then he closed his S3 account.
Time Savings Unlock Efficiencies
By switching to Backblaze B2, Pelligrino gained time and cost savings that allowed him to think about other ways to use partner integrations to create efficiencies and streamline his processes.
For example, Motion is going to start backing up individual workstations using a two-way sync. Before, when they were using S3, they never considered this possibility because of the complexity of setting it up. But with file synchronization partner GoodSync, B2 Cloud Storage can mirror separate workstations on the cloud.
In addition, Motion is making use of Backblaze B2’s Snapshot service—a convenient way to download many files at once from B2 Cloud Storage to a zip file—which makes sharing files with clients infinitely easier. This is a game changer for Motion, which is able to pay for the service with their cost savings and create a better experience for their clients.
Cloud Storage Gains
With Backblaze B2, Motion is able to reduce expenses, implement new functionalities that improve services, and achieve the location-independence that Pelligrino dreamed of when he first started the business. All it took was one conversation at the right time.
Try it for yourself and get started with Backblaze B2 today.
