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When Russian troops began to build on the Ukrainian border, it became clear to John Gleeson, Chief Operating Officer at Atlanta-based Storj, and his team that the situation was more than just saber-rattling.
Ukraine-based Boosty Labs has been a partner of Storj since 2017. Their eight-person team provides employer of record services and contract-to-hire developers who have been working on various technical projects such as user interface and user experience development.
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Over the course of weeks, Storj began to assess how to coordinate efforts to assure the safety of workers and how their storage nodes in eastern Europe could be disrupted with malware attacks.
Most importantly, they sent messages via communications platform Slack to let the contractors in Ukraine know the company would support them.
Eventually, Gleeson and his team started getting Slack messages containing photos and videos of explosions from their contractors in Ukraine as the Russian invasion began. The Ukrainian workers also shared concern over misinformation campaigns spreading when they had seen tanks rolling in and buildings being destroyed.
“It was a cascading effect of people in Ukraine saying ‘look what’s happening to us,’ to the people who work with them saying ‘our team is in trouble,’ to the people in the room going ‘Ok, instead of giving assistance over months, this money needs to get to them now,’” said Gleeson.
Within an hour of the developments, Storj sent the team at Boosty Labs financial assistance in order for them to be able to leave the country, find shelter and do anything else required to stay safe.
According to Gleeson, all of the workers have since escaped Ukraine to neighboring countries with the exception of one who remained for personal reasons. The identities and official titles of the workers were not disclosed.
The executive team at Storj maintains daily communication with Boosty Lab workers via Slack, keeping track of who’s in need of what, who’s in motion, who needs time and who is safe.
Although the situation remains tense and Storj assured them their safety was the biggest priority, the Ukrainian workers have remained productive during this time.
“The weird thing is that a lot of work has continued,” said Gleeson. “There’s so much destruction around them and a lot of them have continued to work because it’s a comforting aspect of life with less uncertainty, or possibly a distraction.”
Storj has also made an effort to provide support for others harmed by the current conflict by donating to the Ukraine Emergency Response Fund.
“Since our team in Ukraine is small, the impact to our business won’t be huge,” said Gleeson. “The better aspect is that we had a huge impact on people by putting them out of harm’s way.”
In addition to threatening the well-being of their Ukrainian contractors, the conflict also has the potential to disrupt Storj’s business operations in other ways.
The company has 338 storage nodes, a physical server that stores data with one or more hard-disk drives, within Ukraine. A Russian malware attack could take those storage nodes offline.
The company has already conducted an analysis that found in that scenario, according to Gleeson, it would luckily not lose any data. Although he says that is “not the way you want to learn about the resiliency of your network.”
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