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Where many cloud storage vendors are under intense scrutiny to prove their value amid escalating costs of sustained and scalable centralized service delivery, Symform is looking to disrupt the nascent market with its decentralized model and new flat rate pricing.

Symform’s timing for new flat-rate pricing couldn’t be better. The entire cloud storage market is under intense scrutiny following two massive business failures over the past month.

A few weeks ago, Iron Mountain announced its withdrawal from cloud storage after disastrous financial results related to the business. The failed initiative cost the CEO his job, and the company may sell off its cloud assets to satisfied disgruntled investors.

Reports are unconfirmed, but it appears Cirtas Systems – the cloud storage vendor that was the hottest thing in cloud computing just a couple of months ago – is also on the ropes. Former employees are tweeting that they’re out on the streets after the venture investors pulled their funding following disappointing sales.

The two things that both companies have in common are costs, and that’s what Symform is attacking in its new pricing plan.

Cloud storage companies promise scalable solutions by providing capacity in centralized data centers. The issue is the cost of building and supporting those data centers, which often operate with substantially less-than-full utilization. This forces storage providers to charge high rates for their services.

Symform takes a much different approach that is more like distributed grid computing. Rather than building big data centers, Symform taps into the unused storage capacity of its clients. By swapping that capacity between clients, it’s able to provide scalable cloud storage at a much lower cost.

The new Symform pricing scheme guarantees predictable storage fees that are guaranteed to be at least 50 percent less than competitors. Where Iron Mountain’s annual storage fees for a subscribing company with 1,000 employees utilizing 50 servers is estimated at $1.4 million, Symform’s cost would be $24,000.

For solution providers reselling and supporting the Symform storage, its service fees are flat rate. This gives Symform partners the ability to be competitive while having accurate forecasting of their actual costs and potential revenue.

Symform is able to operate under lower pricing because it doesn’t own much of the infrastructure to deliver cloud storage. It’s providing the pass-through data management that makes its cloud storage system work. It takes a users’ data, encrypts it, digitally shreds it and distributes the different fragments across provider systems for storage. Through its proprietary system, it’s able to reconstitute the data when users want to retrieve it.

Some users and partners have expressed concern about the security and reliability of the Symform process. Even with 256-bit AES encryption, many organizations aren’t comfortable storing their data on someone else’s server. But Symform assures it only stores fragments of data on shared drives, and all those fragments are encrypted. Further, the company says it would take a catastrophic loss of fragments to prevent it from reconstituting a data set.

Primary storage is not Symform’s role. The service is ideal for “warm” or “cold” storage, so the economies providing the new pricing scheme and distributed approach isn’t for organizations trying to shed their primary on-premise drives. Economically, Symform is well-suited for small and midmarket businesses, but has potential utility for enterprise customers.

Whether Symform is truly visionary and disruptive is a question for time. What’s clear is that it’s trying to shake up the already staid paradigm of the nascent cloud storage market with both its approach and pricing.

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Lawrence M. Walsh is CEO and president of The 2112 Group, a technology business advisory service that specializes in optimizing indirect channels and partner relationships. He’s also the executive director of the Channel Vanguard Council. He is the former publisher of Channel Insider and editor of VARBusiness Magazine. You can reach him at lmwalsh@the2112group.com.

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Larry Walsh:@lmwalsh2112| Channelnomics: @channelnomics