As a co-founder and the CEO of HubStor I am often asked questions like, "what was your inspiration for creating HubStor?", or "how did you determine the idea for the product?".

So here's a short post on the answer.

Drum roll....

I'm happy to say that HubStor is simply the result of listening to dozens of CIOs and enterprise storage pros describe their dream archiving solution.  In our conversations with the men and women that live enterprise storage day in, day out - some with multi-million dollar storage budgets - we consistently heard the following dreams, challenges, and requirements:

• Simple, low-cost archiving of storage to the cloud with policies.
• Economics and convenience of public cloud with privacy and control of private cloud.
• Security features in the cloud like RBAC, PII tagging, and DLP.
• Intuitive access for our users with search, browse, and sharing.
• Complete visibility and auditing of storage, access rights, and activity in the cloud.
• Fast, scalable searching with the ability to scope indexing to targeted subsets of my storage.
• No cloud lock in - easily get our data back when needed.
• Desire to pay for it through simple subscription with nothing upfront and no term commitments.

Basically, they said the cloud is attractive for managing data growth off of primary storage because of its low cost.  But for many IT pros, there are hurdles not easily overcome before legal, security and compliance teams will support archiving data to the cloud.  And the whole issue of making sure users have secure yet simple access to their data was a big question mark.  Nobody wanted to develop their own solution for this. As we dug in with questions it became clear that our expertise in archiving could work to deliver a new kind of cloud archive.

So there you have it.  That's how we arrived at the idea for HubStor. We socialized with IT pros, connected some dots, and voilà!