Cleversafe 2.0 Software With More Security

Cleversafe, Inc. announced its 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 also preventing disclosure of information to unauthorized individuals or systems.

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology, which has been in the market for more than two years, seamlessly and securely divides data into slices, and then disperses them 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 30-60 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 each and every time 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. Last month, Cleversafe 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.

“A number of vendors are now vying for leadership in the race to create a secure data abstraction layer,” said John Webster, Senior Partner of Evaluator Group. “With the release of Cleversafe 2.0, Cleversafe demonstrates a clear lead.”

“The landscape of storage is changing as data continues to proliferate exponentially,” said Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversafe. “Typical cloud security approaches include replication to increase availability, which incurs tremendous overhead expenses and compromises confidentiality. Encryption alone isn’t gaining momentum for the cloud as additional challenges, such as key management, are introduced. Cleversafe has committed its research and resources to ensure information resiliency by architecturing it into the DNA of our storage platform, thereby decreasing costs and complexity for organizations deploying cloud storage.”