Cleversafe 2.0 To Meet Cloud Security Challenges

Cleversafe , a provider of storage solutions ideally suited for storage clouds and massive digital archives, has 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).

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology securely divides data into slices and then disperses them to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centres. Each individual slice is unrecognisable as data and therefore inherently secure, whereas a defined threshold of slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data.

Cleversafe’s approach solves the problems of traditional perimeter security, which does not work in a virtualised or cloud infrastructure.

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 virtualises data using keyless encryption and advanced secret sharing techniques, making slices unrecognisable and secure.

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 authorisation, 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 optimises content distribution, even under failure conditions of storage nodes, or an unbalanced network. These features are table stakes for dispersed storage platforms.