The original concept with Gabb was to keep the data on children’s devices private. The best way to do that was to not have that data shared or stored in the cloud. However, when a phone or watch was broken or lost, the photos or videos on those devices were also lost.

Alen Peacock was brought in as Director of Cloud at Gabb to help build their cloud strategy and fix this problem. “Obviously, it was painful if a customer lost data. But this kind of experience was also costly for customer support in trying to help them recover data or get data transferred from an old phone to a new phone.” Gabb knew they needed to find a solution to improve the customer experience and lower support costs. But it couldn’t be just any cloud storage solution. The security and privacy of this data was paramount.

Alen stresses the importance of data protection to Gabb and their customers.”The security story is really important for us. We're providing kid-safe tech, and keeping child data safe is paramount. A data leak of any sort would be catastrophic. Parents are choosing us, because they trust us to keep their kids safe.”

Knowing that traditional cloud storage regularly suffered data breaches meant that Gabb needed a more secure alternative. Alen was impressed with Storj’s unique approach. “It is much easier to trust a system that is built in a hostile environment than one that is built in a friendly environment. Storj had to build for all the attack vectors so we get a lot of peace of mind and assurance from Storj’s distributed architecture.”

Storj is end-to-end encrypted automatically. This meant no additional development work was needed from the Gabb team to achieve the highest level of security. Alen knew Storj had the security they needed. “When you have a model that requires end-to-end encryption and that encryption is performed more at the edge as opposed to in the data center, that helps the security story a lot as well.”

‍

Gabb compared Storj with incumbents like S3 and while Storj outperformed in security and durability, a big part of internal approvals was the economics of Storj. “It's hard to ignore the cost benefits of Storj when you compare it side by side with the other offerings out there. The way that Storj built this architecture allows them to provide these services for much lower cost, and we can pass that savings on to our customers.”

“I continue to get surprised glances from other executives in the company when we talk about the economics of Storj. And it allows us to create additional value for our customers.” Alen explains the many ways that Storj is helping Gabb create value. “Storj immediately created savings in terms of customer support costs. We're accounting for its usage in our base payment plans for customers — it comes bundled with every phone. The value it provides to our end customers is so high that it's easy to do the internal accounting that says this is a super big win for us from all directions.”

Stakeholders at Gabb had not yet heard of Storj so Alen needed to convince them that Storj was extremely low risk with huge potential benefits. “The S3 compatible layer that Storj provides made that choice easier because we can build with confidence that if there is any problem, it's super easy to swap to another provider.”  Alen says this is a major selling point. “I think that's a huge advantage that Storj has against some of these incumbents is that it is almost risk-free to try it out and convince yourself that it works and fulfills the job that you need it to do.”

The low risk helped get Alen the buy-in needed to get started. “We built the system from the ground up and we built it on Storj first. With those early prototypes, we tested and made sure that they still worked against some of the other providers, just so that we had the confidence that we could switch if we needed to. And luckily we never did need to switch. We have been happy with Storj since day one.”

“Storj has the security, low cost, and reliability we were looking for. Almost any way you look at it, Storj is a better choice for us, than going to one of the bigger players.” In May of 2022, Gabb released their Gabb Cloud product. Storj provides Gabb customers seamless backups of their mobile data. Customers get automatic protection for kids’ photos, videos, contacts, and settings stored on Gabb phones. This service ensures that all their data can be backed up and easily and quickly restored when replacing or upgrading their Gabb Phone.

Looking back over the past year since Gabb Cloud went live, Alen is still very happy with the decision to partner with Storj. “We've had a really good experience with Storj and the system has continued to work really well. As Gabb continues to grow, we now have over 300 TB of data in Storj and have every confidence that Storj will continue to scale with us.”