Greek satellite outfit Planetek picks Cubbit for sovereign storage

A Greek geospatial data company is storing its data on a Cubbit decentralized storage cloud for cash and sovereignty reasons.

Cubbit’s decentralized storage is a web of interconnected individual private organizations’ datacenters with spare storage capacity, managed through its DS3 Composer software. These sites or nodes provide S3-compatible storage with data split into fragments, encrypted and encoded for resilience and spread across the nodes.

Planetek Hellas is a satellite Earth observation company. It obtains geospatial data from Earth-orbiting satellites, with its own on-satellite software. It makes this data available, via its Rheticus analytics facility, for environmental and infrastructure monitoring, urban planning, civil protection and security. Along with Planetek Italia, it is part of the D-Orbit group, which specializes in space logistics.

Planetek needed to backup and archive its geospatial data, and keep it inside Greece. It has ordered 3.5 PB of storage from Cubbit, with planned expansion to 5 PB in the future. Planetek CTO Sergio Samarelli said: “With Cubbit, we’ve built a solid and flexible infrastructure that enables us to meet the highest security requirements in the strategic field of Earth Observation. The ability to maintain full control of the data within our technological perimeter, and the sovereignty guarantee offered to our customers, gives us a key strategic advantage.”

The company has contracts with the European Space Agency and participates in many European and national research projects. All this means that, as EU data sovereignty requirements get enforced, it is well placed to continue and expand these activities.

Why doesn’t Planetek run its own in-house object storage or use a mainstream public cloud such as AWS? It says it has evaluated various traditional on-prem object storage systems over the years, but they would have required significant IT resources. As for the mainstream public cloud alternative, it “was not an option due to concerns over data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and economic constraints.” The basic reasons it chose the decentralized Cubbit alternative were cost and data sovereignty.

Alessandro Cillario, co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, said: “This is the first in a series of projects in the space industry that we are working on, and which we hope to announce in the coming months. In this sector, the need to securely store and share data is directly linked to stringent requirements for data sovereignty and control over one’s technological infrastructure. “

The best control over your technological infrastructure comes from owning and operating it yourself. While decentralized storage can be cheaper than AWS or Azure and can offer stronger data-sovereignty assurances, it still provides less control than running your own datacenters. This, as Samarelli says, comes at a cost.

This is a good win for Cubbit, leaving it well placed to capture more business from customers in the EU with data sovereignty requirements and facing cost pressures.