Impossible Cloud is a new cloud storage company that is changing the way businesses store their data. In this VMblog Q&A interview, we spoke with Dr. Kai Wawrzinek, Founder & CEO of Impossible Cloud, about the company's background, its benefits, the challenges that it solves for enterprises.  Dr. Wawrzinek also discusses how Impossible Cloud is providing a more secure, cost-effective, and sustainable alternative to traditional cloud storage providers.  And he also shares insight into the company's partnership with Veritas and its plans for the future.

VMblog:  Can you tell me about your background and where the idea for Impossible Cloud came about? 

Dr. Kai Wawrzinek:  Our leadership team includes seasoned tech-company founders with a history of building successful public companies and startups.

While taking Goodgame Studios public and turning it into a global online gaming leader, my co-founder Dr. Christian Kaul and I worked with big tech cloud vendors. We quickly realized that existing solutions did not meet the requirements for price, capacity, and performance needed to scale long term.

The centralized business model controlled by a few big tech cloud vendors has led to high costs and complex pricing. Meanwhile, the need to store and manage increasingly large data volumes is growing.

For many businesses to scale in the cloud long term, an efficient, distributed network of many (edge-) endpoints is needed. The idea for Impossible Cloud was born to offer a better, more affordable solution through decentralized web3 technology.

VMblog:  What are the benefits of Impossible Cloud's decentralized cloud solution, and what challenges are you solving for enterprises?

Wawrzinek:  Impossible Cloud is the first decentralized, enterprise-grade cloud provider offering high-performance, outage-proof, Kubernetes-friendly, S3-compatible object storage for up to 80% less than ‘big tech' storage solutions.

Our platform is based on web3 technology, taking advantage of spare capacity from a growing global footprint of top-tier data centers to provide cloud services with better capabilities and lower complexity than traditional providers.

We are building a bridge between web2 (centralized) and web3 (decentralized) by combining the convenience, industry standards, and fiat payment model of web2 with the superior economics, performance, security and scalability of web3.

Just a few business benefits of our combined approach include:

• Lower costs: Efficient storage algorithms plus utilizing existing capacity across a network of top-tier data centers keep prices low.

• Faster performance: Because our cloud solutions operate in an efficient, distributed network of nodes, data is always locally available for edge performance and all storage is ‘hot' without the need for tiering.

• Seamless interoperability: 100% S3 API compatibility ensures that our solution integrates with any backup or data management software, so customers can easily switch to Impossible Cloud Storage with one line of code and continue using their existing scripts

• Transparent pricing: Our easy-to-understand, transparent fiat currency pricing plans don't require crypto currency and carry no hidden or egress fees. We also have flexible purchasing options and pay per use pricing.

• Infinite Scalability: Our solution is architected for scale with almost unlimited hot storage. This, along with our flexible pricing, enables us to help future proof organizations as their data volumes and complexity grows.
  

VMblog:  Security is top of mind for enterprises and end users. How can Impossible Cloud and its partners enhance security measures and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR?

Wawrzinek:  We prioritize data privacy compliance and provide full transparency into where data is stored, which removes data sovereignty risks. For clients who require it, we can use geo-fencing to ensure their data is stored within top-tier GDPR-certified data centers in the EU (or, if required even only within Germany).

For all our clients' storage, we only work with tier 3+ data centers fulfilling the highest industry standards. This includes compliance with most international standards, such as ISO27001, SOC-2, HIPPA, GDPR, ISO22301, and others.

Furthermore, Impossible Cloud surpasses industry standards with its proprietary security software layer. This introduces many key features, such as Microsoft multi-factor authentication (MFA); object lock; triple encryption; programmable identity access management (IAM); and cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).

Our solution is designed for 100% durability, and guarantees 99.95% availability - above industry standard. Therefore, organizations can be sure their data is available whenever needed. Additionally, our modern, decentralized storage inherently protects data from ransomware and cyber attacks by eliminating single points of failure.

Because of its efficiency and security benefits, Impossible Cloud is often used to add another layer of protection to backup and disaster recovery plans that may be currently based on on-premise infrastructure, or even tape, or stored in the same cloud as primary business data.

VMblog:  What has the early response been from your customers so far?

Wawrzinek:  We're a relatively new company and recently launched the general availability of our object storage solution this April.   However, we have already made numerous deployments exceeding hundreds of TBs in storage.

So far, our impact and successes among customers are:

• Large Cost Savings:  Due to our unique architecture, customers have saved up to 80%compared to AWS S3

• End User Data Volume is Surging: Stored data has surged by roughly 22% month-over-month. If this continues, it will result in an annual growth rate of almost 10x

• Customers like using the platform: Post-onboarding, not a single B2B client, distributor, or channel partner has discontinued their association or use of Impossible Cloud. Similarly, 100% of B2B customers have retained their service subscriptions, underscoring the consistent satisfaction and trust in the platform.
  

VMblog:  Tell us more about Impossible Cloud's Partner Program. How does it facilitate integration and collaboration with prospective IT channel partners?

Wawrzinek:  Impossible Cloud has seen rapid interest and adoption of its channel partner program, which includes industry leading firms such as Veritas, Comet Backup and Acronis, among others.

The program was developed to support various prospective channel partners - including VARs, SIs, MSPs and ISVs - to directly benefit their customers with more scalable and affordable cloud storage.

For the partners we work with, our solution offers a flexible, consumption-based infrastructure enabling MSPs to adjust the storage resources they provide their clients in a manner that is secure, efficient, measurable and reliable.  They can also deploy Impossible Cloud easily. With just a single line of code, customers can access Impossible Cloud's services within minutes.  

VMblog:  We recently covered your new partnership with Veritas Backup Exec. Tell us how companies such as this are integrating your solution? What benefits can MSPs and end-users expect?

Wawrzinek:  Our technology partnerships enable B2B users, MSPs and Resellers to seamlessly utilize industry-leading solutions in conjunction with Impossible Cloud's S3-compatible storage. The partnership with Veritas was recently announced, and brings together our decentralized cloud services with Veritas Technologies' fast, cost-effective and unified backup and recovery capabilities. This gives MSPs a simple, powerful and transparently priced solution to comply with data privacy laws and safeguard critical business data.

VMblog:  What are your plans for Impossible Cloud moving forward, and what role will this partnership play in your vision for the future?

Wawrzinek:  We are expanding to more data centers and continuing to improve upon our object storage product and existing solutions to provide superior quality, features and cost for B2B customers and the vast reseller landscape.

Impossible Cloud is also continually building its vast partner ecosystem to enable VARs, SIs, MSPs and others to directly benefit their customers with more scalable and affordable cloud storage. To this end, our growing roster of technology partnerships and integrations with industry-leaders, such as Veritas and others, will greatly enhance our capabilities.

As we invest in our mid- to long-term vision to bridge the gap between web2 clients and web3 technology, we will continue introducing new capabilities. Our first product is cloud storage, but we'll continue to build out our solution roadmap and partner ecosystem to become a full-service business cloud.

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