Clever Safe for Mission Critical Data

7/29/2019 Clever Safe for Mission Critical Data

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January 2013

White Paper:Cleversafe for Mission CriticalData

CTOlabs.com

Inside: Mission Critical Data is Big Data

Scale As Large As You Want

Lessons learned for your enterprise deployment

A White Paper providing context and guidance you can use


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Cleversafe for Mission Critical Data

Mission critical data is the information on which your organizations operations hinge. Like most

information in the modern enterprise, mission critical data is expanding rapidly in the age of big

data. In national security and the intelligence community, this is the information that can save lives if

leveraged properly or endanger them if lost, stolen, or mismanaged. With mission critical data, there

is no room for error, so besides scaling to match growing needs, the infrastructure to store and access

this data must be reliable and secure. Yet with todays shrinking budgets and narrowing prot margins,

government and private organizations cannot aord to spend more to manage even the most

essential information.

Cleversafe oers a solution uniquely suited to storing the mission critical data of the modern

enterprise. It oers innitely scalable public or private cloud storage that is simultaneously more

secure and reliable than conventional information infrastructure yet less costly. As a result, Cleversafe

has been recognized by In-Q-tel, the Central Intelligence Agencys venture capital arm, specically for

its role in storing mission critical data, and can help your organization handle its most vital information

more eciently and eectively.

Mission Critical Data is Big Data

Big Data is the data too large, complex, unstructured, and rapidly expanding for traditional information

infrastructure. Both government and private sector enterprises are now drawing unprecedented

insight from unstructured data sources such as text, video, clickstreams, pictures, and logs. When

properly leveraged and analyzed, this data can be extremely valuable, timely, and sensitive. One

poignant example in national security is the information collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, which

generated 24 years of footage alone even in 2009, and has been growing by orders of magnitude with

innovations such as Gorgon Stare, which allows a single drone to capture footage of an entire city. For

a private rm, this data can be the business intelligence that allows it to stand out from its competitors,

or personally identifying information from millions of customers that can lead to extremely damaging

breaches. This data is necessary for organizations to operate, constantly growing, and would be

disastrous if leaked, stolen, or rendered inaccessible.

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A White Paper for the Government IT Community

Cleversafe Scales Innitely with Your Critical Data

Cleversafe uses a patented object-based storage solution to disperse data through the cloud while

keeping it secure and accessible. Dispersing information across networked o-the-shelf storage nodes

leads to unlimited storage as you can easily add nodes as

your needs increase. Cleversafe also stores that data more

eciently, with a unique information dispersal architecture

that uses only one minimally expanded instance of the data

rather than multiple copies as in conventional RAID storage.

Cleversafe uses object based storage, referencing objects

by ID or le names. This allows for easier movement and

migration of data, performance scalability with unlimited

simultaneous readers and writers directly to the objects. And

due to the way the system is architected, there are no name

nodes or other potential single points of failure.

Securely Store and Access YourMost Sensitive Data

Cleversafes Dispersed Storage technology is an inherently

secure way to store data even in public clouds. Objects are

divided into slices and then distributed across disks, servers,

and data centers, with each slice unrecognizable as data. A

dened threshold of slices from the same object is needed

to recreate the original data.

Cleversafe uses Secureslice for all or nothing encryption,

which means that information can only be deciphered if all

of it is known. The encryption key is sliced and dispersed

along with the data, so condentiality and integrity are

preserved even if individual slices are compromised.

Secureslice also eliminated the need for key management

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Cloud First

The Oce of Management and Budget

mandated in scal year 2011 that federal

agencies must leverage cloud computing

and/or make cloud computing part of new

IT projects or be ready to justify why not. By

scal year 2013, the policy requires agencies

to provide specic details and road maps for

adopting cloud-based technologies. For state

and local agencies, many are recognizing the

cost benets of leveraging a cloud approach

to providing IT services.

Leveraging the cloud as a means to oer

storage is quickly becoming an accepted

service for many government entities.

However, cloud storage is not without

questions. Security, privacy and reliability

are, of course, important topics. Yet, the

most pressing discussion is how to deal with

the ever increasing need for more - more

throughput, more storage space. There

are storage predictions that state storage

requirements are growing 100x every tenyears. Already, todays existing storage

solutions are struggling to scale to meet

demand and have become prohibitively

expensive for most applications.


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while allowing AES-256/SHA-256 encryption meeting the strictest federal standards.

Network trac is also encrypted and, if the trac is tapped or routed through an attacker, the hacker

will not be able to learn anything about the content of the transmission. In addition, Cleversafes

PerfectBits ensures that any alterations of the trac will be

detected and discarded.

Cleversafe also allows for secure multitenancy on a shared

storage cloud. Each clients data remains securely protected

and unrecognizable by other clients on the system, reducing

the risk of insider threats.

All of Your Data Whenever YouNeed It

Mission critical data is also the information that most

needs to be reliable. This is the data that your organization

needs to be able to access at any time, and it needs to be

trustworthy. Using PerfectBits integrity and an always on

architecture, Cleversafe delivers many orders of magnitude

more reliability than conventional RAID.

Cleversafe uses no centralized servers so capacity and

performance can be scaled independently. The always on

architecture allows successful writes and reads even if not all

storage nodes are available, overcoming latency problems,

drive failure on nodes, and even data centers down due to

maintenance or an outage. Rolling upgrades also mean thatthe system is never down for scheduled maintenance.

Cleversafes PerfectBits also ensures that the data arrives

unaltered and uncorrupted. It performs two levels of

integrity checks, verifying each individual slice as well as the

Data Center Consolidation

Do more with less. Clich as it sounds, this

is the truth that most, if not all, government

agencies are living with. In fact, one might

say they are being asked to do even more

with even less. Federal agencies, as well as

state and local entities, are looking at data

center consolidation as one strategy to

increase cost eciencies. The elimination

of duplicative systems alone can have a

signicant impact on an agencys IT budget.

Moving to a consolidated environment is

not without concerns. Questions about

the security and privacy of information

come up. Concern over the loss of control

and the availability of systems and data are

prevalent. From the perspective of data

storage, these are legitimate concerns.

Cleversafe addresses these concerns

through a combination of its innovative

information dispersal algorithm and

an agile architecture that allows the

solution to conform to the varied needs

of government organizations. To ensure

security and privacy of information, data

is rst encrypted using AES-256, broken

down into equal size slices and dispersed

across a network of storage nodes.


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A White Paper For The Federal IT Community

data le, which is conrmed prior to delivery. As a result, the system can detect if even a single bit isout of place, resulting in bit-perfect recreation of your data.

Increase Security, Scalability, andReliability While Decreasing Costs

With shrinking budgets in government and industry, its

hard to devote additional resources to even your most

important data. You cannot aord to skimp on the security orreliability of your critical data, and storing less of

the information you need to complete your mission is

not an option. Cleversafe manages to increase the security,

scalability, and reliability of your data while decreasing

costs over 50%.

Cleversafes SecureSlice technology achieves redundancy

by minimally expanding your data rather than duplicating

it before slicing it, so that not all slices are required for a

bit-perfect recreation. This results in the same availability of

storing three to four copies of the data in traditional RAID

infrastructure while reducing storage requirements by up

to ve times.

Cleversafe also simplies your storage infrastructure,

reducing management costs. Multiple applications can

leverage the same storage infrastructure, and nodes are

virtualized so that data is not tied to specic hardware.This makes storage infrastructure simpler to manage and

expand, and makes migrating data as easy as adding

hardware, with the system handling the rest. As a result, a

single administrator manage can terabytes to exabytes of

data using a web-based management system.

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Meeting DR/COOP Requirements

Even in the wake of budget crunches,

government agencies are still required to have

a viable DR/COOP plan in place. Given the

governments increased reliance on complex

IT systems coupled with the exponentially

growing requirement to store more data,

eectively meeting DR/COOP requirements

is no easy task. System complexity and

costs have made the traditional approach

of duplicative, geographically dispersed IT

environments unattainable for all but the

most essential services. Innovation is required.

With regards to data storage, conventional

wisdom dictates the more copies of a le, the

higher the probability the le will be available

for use at all times, even during a crisis event.

Many DR/COOP strategies are rooted in this

belief. However, with multiple copies of les,

a host of new risks are introduced that tend

to negate the benets of making copies. Each

additional copy creates a security vulnerability,

keeping les synchronized becomes

problematic, and each replication requires

the same amount of storage and associated

overhead costs, such as power, cooling,

management, etc. as the original le.


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What Cleversafe Can Do For Your Mission Critical Data

Increasingly, mission critical data is Big Data, but along with increased scale, this information needs

higher standards of security and reliability without higher costs. By storing your data securely in a

public or private cloud with minimal expansion, multiple layers of integrity and security assurance,

and simplied infrastructure and management, Cleversafe delivers all of this and more. Cleversafe is

the ideal storage system for the Big Data your organization needs to complete its missions and cannot

aord to lose to hackers, maintenance, technical failures, hackers, or malicious insiders.

Concluding Thoughts

Systems like those provided by Cleversafe oer signicant benets to mission critical data and to the

overall missions of federal, state and local agencies. For more on how these benets can contribute to

your organization we suggest contacting Cleversafe to arrange for a hands-on demonstration of this

capability.

More Reading

For more federal technology and policy issues visit:

CTOvision.com- A blog for enterprise technologists with a special focus on Big Data.

CTOlabs.com - A reference for research and reporting on all IT issues.

J.mp/ctonews - Sign up for the Government Technology Newsletters.

Cleversafe.com - Read use cases and track the latest Cleversafe capabilities.


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A White Paper For The Federal IT Community

About the AuthorsBob Gourley is CTO and founder of Crucial Point LLC and editor and chief of CTOvision.com He is a former

federal CTO. His career included service in operational intelligence centers around the globe where his

focus was operational all source intelligence analysis. He was the rst director of intelligence at DoDs Joint

Task Force for Computer Network Defense, served as director of technology for a division of Northrop

Grumman and spent three years as the CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob serves on numerous

government and industry advisory boards. Contact Bob at [email protected]

Ryan Kamauis a technology research analyst at Crucial Point LLC, focusing on disruptive

technologies of interest to enterprise technologists. He writes at http://ctovision.com. He researches

and writes on developments in technology and government best practices for CTOvision.com and

CTOlabs.com, and has written numerous whitepapers on these subjects. Contact Ryan at Ryan@

crucialpointllc.com

Alexander Olesker is a technology research analyst at Crucial Point LLC, focusing on disruptive

technologies of interest to enterprise technologists. He writes at http://ctovision.com. Alex is a

graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a degree

in Science, Technology, and International Aairs. He researches and writes on developments in

technology and government best practices.

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For More Information

If you have questions or would like to discuss this report, please contact me. As an advocate for better

IT in government, I am committed to keeping the dialogue open on technologies, processes and best

practices that will keep us moving forward.

Contact:Bob Gourley

[email protected]

703-994-0549

All information/data 2013 CTOLabs.com.

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Clever Safe for Mission Critical Data