Backblaze ‘Spring Release’ for B2 Cloud Storage Platform

Backblaze, Inc. announces the ‘Spring Release’ for its B2 Cloud Storage platform.

This latest Infrastructure-as-a-Service release includes a slate of security enhancements, performance upgrades, and new partnerships-expanding customers’ ability to build applications and safeguard data.

The goal for this release: make storing and using data easier and more secure.

The company has delivered cloud storage through B2 Cloud Storage since launching the platform – it takes only minutes to onboard, supports countless development and IT use cases with a partner ecosystem in the 1,000s, and is a fraction the cost of others with no hidden fees or pricing tiers.

“Backblaze already has over an exabyte of data under management – that’s some 500 billion files that customers entrust us with – and the B2 Cloud Storage platform serves as a building block for a range of businesses and organizations,” said Gleb Budman, CEO and co-founder. “With this release and our growing partner ecosystem, we’re continuing our mission to make storing and using data astonishingly easy.“

Full slate is detailed on company’s blog, with highlights collected here.

• Security: The release of S3 Compatible Object Lock means anyone using the standard S3 protocol can activate immediate, enhanced protection vs. ransomware and human errors – with no additional coding needed.

  “We deployed Backblaze B2 in less than a day, putting a virtual air gap between our customers and their data,” Gregory Tellone, CEO, Continuity Centers, a DR-as-a-service provider (DRaaS MSP), shared. “Protecting customers vs. hackers and ransomware, disgruntled employees and accidental deletion. We consider Backblaze one of our front lines of defense.”

• The firm also introduced Object Lock Legal Hold, to set indefinite file holds for compliance and retention requirements; Server Side Encryption (SSE) for optional added protection; and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to enable content in B2 Cloud Storage to be yet securely served from other websites-all offered with the same low or no code approach.

• Performance upgrades: The company grew storage capacity by 65% since January of 2020, expanded API servers, and carried out network enhancements to provide scale, resilience, availability, and speed to enable support for customers.

• Growing integrations: For its growing developer customer base, firm‘s qualification as a Hashicorp Terraform partner empowers developers to provision and manage B2 Cloud Storage directly from Terraform configuration files-supporting their Infrastructure as Code (IaC) efforts. As Asvin Ramesh, senior director, alliances, HashiCorp, commented, “We are pleased to have Backblaze join our partner program as a new technology partner. With the new HashiCorp Terraform Verified Provider for Backblaze, users can easily provision and manage B2 Cloud Storage resources making life simpler for developers as they manage their storage solution via IaC.“

  The Hashicorp announcement leads a long list of highlighted new and recent partners that work with Backblaze B2-including Signiant for fast file transfers; Tape Ark for tape to cloud data migration; EU-based Cherry Servers for open cloud infrastructure and compute; Fastly for edge cloud and CDN integration with zero-egress fees; Veeam for easy offsite backup and recovery of virtual, physical, and multi-cloud infrastructures; and Facebook as part of the Data Transfer Project. Meanwhile, long-time partner Arq extended its ransomware protection with native integration of our object lock, while Cloudflare added support for sending Logpush data directly to Backblaze B2.

• Coming soon: Later this year, the B2 Cloud Storage platform will add a Partner API, giving software partners the ability to provision and manage B2’s scalable storage natively-creating a single, streamlined user experience for their customers. As Nilay Patel, VP, sales and partnerships, Backblaze, put it, “Our partnership ecosystem is a central aspect of our commitment to being a trusted, neutral solution for organizations big and small. We can’t wait to introduce the Partner API because it will make it even easier for our partners and their customers to get started with Backblaze B2.“

What this means is that a growing population of developers, IT professionals, and problem solvers who need cloud solutions can make use of the ease Backblaze delivers.

Resource:
Blog: Spring Forward: The B2 Cloud Storage Platform Spring Release Is Here