The message from Google that your storage is full, that you have filled your free space of 15 GB, leaves you with a choice: either delete some emails, photos, and videos, or buy more storage space. Businesses grapple with similar problems but at a far greater scale as they increasingly generate data that needs secure storage. To address the issue of cloud storage for Indian firms, Amit Chaurasia, who has spent 22 years “purely building storage products”, founded a startup, Dataneers, in Pune to align with the nation's goal to become self-reliant in terms of data storage. Dataneers' service holds significance, taking into account the fact that the top cloud vendors operating in India are based in foreign countries. The main risk lies in the fact that these multinational corporations operate under their own respective legal frameworks, adds Chaurasia, while mentioning an Indian company whose 10 years' data was jeopardized because the cloud vendor blocked access to its services. “This was due to some policy violation, which this company had no idea about. It was a small company, and its 10-15 years of business data were in jeopardy. Cloud storage is widely preferred for its ease of management and the extensive features it offers to the smallest customers. The terms of use and policies of the top cloud vendors vary, and if an Indian organisation happens to violate any of these, the company can suspend or block access to its services,” says Chaurasia. Dataneers focuses on building data storage solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), a segment that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spoke of strengthening in the Union Budget. “We are one of the few firms building indigenous data storage products,” says Chaurasia. “Almost all data storage products used in India, across both public and private sectors, are developed by non-Indian companies,” adds Chaurasia. The startup has been leveraging open-source technologies, enabling companies to build both foundational and complex storage products using community-driven software. “The Indian government, too, actively encourages the adoption of open-source solutions,” he adds. This week, Dataneers is launching a Network Attached Storage (NAS), a simple storage system in which a customer plugs into its network and creates shares so that members of the organization are able to access and store data in a centralized way. Customised, cloud-like storage solution “Once the data is stored on the centralised server, we provide a mechanism to back up that data to the cloud or any other location preferred by the customer. This ensures that even if the primary NAS storage experiences a failure, the data remains secure and accessible.We go a step further. The company has built a complete data pipeline that not only stores information but also safeguards it across multiple environments, whether on the cloud or customer-designated locations,” says Chaurasia. Moreover, clients can specify the required data volume, and Dataneers designs a customised, cloud-like storage solution for them on their premises. “This approach delivers the flexibility of cloud storage without the financial unpredictability of public cloud providers,” says Chaurasia. “Going forward, we will provide a similar kind of service on the cloud to provide companies with ways to store the data that they can own. They do not have to rely on somebody else's policy fees or services. At present, there are cloud vendors who offer security options, but these are very costly for Indian mid-tier organizations. We are building cloud-based storage solutions that will not be owned by any other vendor,” says Chaurasia. Lack of brand presence, a key challenge What could turn into a challenge for Dataneers is a lack of brand presence. “We do not have a large marketing budget, but we are also hopeful that our cost differential will be a plus for us. The experience of the customers who have used our products has been positive, and this is fuelling us to go further,” says Chaurasia.
