Cleversafe 2.0 Provides Cloud Security
Software addresses information security core principles --confidentiality, integrity, and availability -- within virtualized and cloud storage infrastructures
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Cleversafe Inc. has released Cleversafe 2.0 software to address the cloud security challenges existing with legacy storage approaches. With this new release, Cleversafe addresses the core principles of information security -- confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).
Given that security vulnerabilities for data most often occur when multiple copies of data are retained and replicated, according to a 2009 Verizon business data breach report, the best defense against such breaches is to avoid retaining the data in the first place. The report also recommends minimizing the retention and replication of data. Users leveraging Cleversafe's approach to storing data eliminates this threat while preventing disclosure of information to unauthorized individuals or systems.
Cleversafe's Dispersed Storage technology, available for more than two years, seamlessly and securely divides data into slices, then disperses the slices to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centers. Each individual slice is unrecognizable as data and therefore inherently secure, whereas a defined threshold of slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data. This approach replaces costly replication with only a 30 to 60 percent storage expansion and yet has even higher availability than four replicated copies.
Cleversafe's approach solves the problems of traditional perimeter security which does not work in a virtualized or cloud infrastructure. Customers value the approach of how securing the confidentiality of data shifts from securing the perimeter to transforming data to be inherently secure.
Key functionality enhancements within Cleversafe 2.0 align with the CIA principles of information security:
Confidentiality
Securing data in a multi-tenancy environment is possible with Cleversafe's 2.0 SecureSlice confidentiality, which virtualizes data using keyless encryption and advanced secret sharing techniques, making slices unrecognizable and inherently secure. Although common advice is to encrypt data in the cloud, key management, bulk encryption, and re-encryption after compromise present serious challenges to cloud storage.
Cleversafe solves all these problems with a keyless encryption approach. Customers are in control of reconstructing their data, with the confidence that their data is inherently secure in motion or at rest because the original data can't be recognized without access to a threshold number of slices.
Integrity
PerfectBits integrity, included in Cleversafe 2.0, guarantees bit-perfect data storage and delivery. With both slice level integrity checking and data level integrity checking, data is verified as bit-perfect before being delivered. This ensures data cannot be modified without authorization and detects malicious threats. PerfectBits integrity also proactively monitors and corrects data integrity through an intelligent background process on storage nodes. Proactive error correction is crucial for long-term archives and massive digital stores where information isn't frequently accessed.
Availability
Cleversafe 2.0 includes features to enable upgrade, expansion, and migration with an always-on architecture. Zero downtime upgrades, hot swap disk replacement, storage and performance expansion without interruption, and an architecture that tolerates six or more simultaneous failures, helps cloud storage providers deliver on their SLAs. SmartWrite™ assurance guarantees availability for writing data by ranking Slicestor nodes, whereas SmartRead optimizes content distribution, even under failure conditions of storage nodes, or an unbalanced network. These features are table stakes for dispersed storage platforms.
This new release follows on the recent expansions to the Cleversafe hardware platform. Cleversafe recently expanded its hardware platform with 8 and 24TB storage capacities for storage nodes and an all-in-one storage cabinet for enterprise-class data centers. This allows customers to scale from terabytes to petabytes of storage for large digital content files, such as videos, audio files and images. These hardware progressions also provide the foundation for Cleversafe 2.0 improved resiliency enhancements.
More information is available at www.cleversafe.com.