Overview
• Enhanced Efficiency: Storj’s distributed cloud storage offers higher performance and eliminates manual processes.
• Cost Savings: Switching to Storj significantly reduced cloud storage expenses while maintaining high performance and security.
• Improved Security: Storj’s architecture provides robust security features, ensuring the protection of sensitive data.
Background
UNINTERRUPTED is the athlete empowerment brand within The SpringHill Company, founded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter, that combines media experiences and consumer products in the sports culture space. UNINTERRUPTED Canada (UNINTERRUPTED CA), the company’s Canadian-based unit, faced the challenges of a fragmented media workflow, a new remote workforce, costly cloud storage space, and inadequate cloud storage performance for their evolving needs. The innovative, distributed cloud storage of Storj was implemented resulting in much higher efficiency, significantly lower costs, and additional benefits.
Traditional media workflow limitations
Previously, UNINTERRUPTED CA post-production and media workflow involved a manual-based process that included physically shipping hard drives storing their media to the editing offices. When the global health pandemic hit in 2020, new challenges, such as a team working remotely, compounded the inefficiencies and cost associated with their traditional media workflow.
“Nobody was used to the remote workflow,” explains Aden Bahadori, Head of Post & Tech, UNINTERRUPTED CA. “Everything was fragmented as our team was dispersed throughout the globe. Terabytes of video footage needed to be transferred to cloud storage but there was almost zero visibility over the quality control of what got transferred.”
Aden adds that there was no training for the team on how to work remotely and adapt to the cloud within the constraints of the traditional media workflow. “All these new tools came in while we had a traditional media workflow so we’d be on Zoom five to ten times a day trying to figure out things. The first few months of this was very rough.”
Lack of performance, storage space, and scale
Aden stresses the fact that internet speeds are not the same around the globe or even within a town. “We are primarily in Canada but we also have team members in other countries. For example, during the pandemic, an editor may have moved to a remote area in Canada with slow internet speeds. Uploading content caused crashes and freezes with the previous cloud storage provider.”
The company, with its evolving and fast-paced post-production workflows, needed to scale but was locked in by their previous cloud provider. Meanwhile, the cost, complexities, and obstacles grew.
“There was an instance when we were uploading media and the cloud storage provider we were using before Storj told us to stop uploading because something was broken on their end,” recounts Aden. “Post-production is on a time schedule where there are fast deadlines. This was a nightmare because stopping post-production is not an option.”
UNINTERRUPTED CA needed to find a new cloud storage solution that could solve their evolving challenges.
Storj spoke the same language.
Fortunately, UNINTERRUPTED CA met with Storj and set up a free trial account. The Storj team explained how it would integrate with existing products such as iconik, a service UNINTERRUPTED uses to gather media from both cloud and on-premise storage. “We started transferring video footage to test and I instantly noticed the performance,” says Aden. “Storj is a lot faster than other solutions we have used. We also haven’t had any downtime yet and we’ve been transferring terabytes of data.”
Savings coupled with increased performance and security
Aden explains that he showed Storj to the UNINTERRUPTED CA executives who were extremely impressed by how well it worked - and even more impressed with the cost savings. “The cost of Storj was definitely appreciated by our leadership team. We were able to dramatically reduce our spend on cloud storage without sacrificing performance, security or other requirements – in fact, Storj is much faster and it doesn’t matter where in the world you need to access your data.”
Storj’s distributed network delivers the performance that UNINTERRUPTED CA required while obviating manual processes and saving hours. “What I uploaded to Storj within the last 24 hours would have taken 5 times the amount of time with the previous cloud storage provider,” says Aden.
Enhanced security from Storj
UNINTERRUPTED CA works with a lot of financial clients who require the most stringent cybersecurity. Since teaming up with Storj, the company can rest assured that their client sensitive data is secure thanks to Storj’s distributed architecture, default encryption, and delegated authorization. Storj gives customers control over encryption and the ability to provide keys that even Storj cannot access.
“Every bit of data must be super protected,” adds Aden. “With Storj everybody feels confident, safe and secure.”
Future horizons
UNINTERRUPTED CA looks forward to their continuing partnership with Storj.
“The beauty of Storj is how simplified it is to get team members, technical and non-technical, onboard and using it,” says Aden. “If we have any questions, the Storj team is always available to speak with us and help.”
UNINTERRUPTED CA is happy to have teamed up with Storj to solve the specific challenges they experienced with their previous cloud storage provider. Today, the media company experiences improved performance, lower costs, increased storage, augmented security, and other benefits. During the migration process, their decision was reinforced when the previous provider lost almost a terabyte of data due to a faulty archive process.
“Storj is organized, secure, affordable, and fast,” adds Aden. “I feel we just scratched the surface of Storj so we are looking forward to deploying the solution to the rest of my SpringHill Company team and exploring additional uses for Storj.”
