Some think that Cloud Storage is not secure, others think it is not cost-effective and others think chain-of-custody and shared tenancy bring along major headaches from a management perspective. Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman recently released a report, Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage, the key takeaway being respondents show little interest in general storage-as-a-service offerings. While we at Cleversafe don’t disagree that there are definite challenges that must be overcome to successfully adopt and implement a Cloud Storage strategy, we also believe that we have effectively addressed the major barriers to adoption as outlined in the Forrester report. The barriers being a. guaranteed service levels, b. security, c. chain of custody, d. shared tenancy, and e. long-term pricing.
Guaranteed Service Levels
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are designed to provide customers—whether they are using Cloud Storage or traditional storage solutions—with a foundation for the expected level of service between the customer and the provider. Typically, SLAs are defined in terms of the following two metrics[i]:
- Availability – is the service up and running when needed
- Performance – is the service providing the customer with the agreed-upon level of performance for write/read requests
While many Cloud Storage providers are able to meet these requirements, their capabilities directly relate to the underlying storage provider. Most storage providers rely on replication and multiple copies of the data to ensure high levels of availability. Cleversafe instead uses Dispersal Algorithms to provide unprecedented levels of availability. Coupling this utmost availability with wire-speed performance ensures that SLAs are guaranteed.
Security
Transitioning data that resides within a company’s firewalls and security policies to the Public Cloud leaves customers with increasing concerns over the security of their data and even more so, who may have access. There are many methods that can be employed to address these security concerns; however, usually they involve utilizing a third-party security application which can become very costly and burdensome to manage. Cleversafe has developed a technology called SecureSlice™ which uses encryption, the All-Or-Nothing Transformation (AONT), an integrity check value, and Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDAs) to effectively split data into bit-perfect and inherently secure slices. The result is slices that do not contain any representation of the original data, and require a threshold number (M of N fault tolerance) to bit-perfectly recreate the data. So what does this mean to the customer? It means the likelihood of a security breach is significantly lower and in some cases altogether eliminated.
Chain of Custody
Although not unique to Cloud Storage, chain-of-custody in this context refers to the management and traceability of the data from the original source (customer) through the Cloud Storage provider and then back again to the source (customer). Concerns exist that during this journey, the data can be compromised and/or modified. Further complicating this is the “virtual nature” of the data as it exists within the Cloud, which often makes the tracking of the “virtual data” an administrative nightmare. With the proper set of access controls, audit capabilities and administrative policies, customers should be able to feel confident that their chain-of-custody remains intact. Because the data is virtualized and immutable due to Cleversafe’s SecureSlice™ technology, customers using Cleversafe storage can also feel confident that their chain-of-custody is not compromised.
Shared Tenancy
Along with the concern of chain of custody; Cloud Storage users also worry about shared tenancy as a potential data security breach. To prevent this, Cloud Storage providers must be able to effectively separate the different “tenants” and ensure security policies are enforced to prevent another tenant from accessing the data. Most Cloud Storage providers prevent this type of multi-tenant data breach by supporting security policies that are enforced at the volume or virtual storage container (as referred to by the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative specification) level. These policies guarantee that a tenant’s data will remain secure and immutable from another tenant within their Cloud Storage environment. Cleversafe has incorporated policy-based containers that it refers to as “vaults” to signify they are secure and immutable by anyone other than the vault owner.
Long-term Pricing
Customers are considering Cloud Storage for many reasons. Two of the most important reasons are scalability and cost effectiveness. Rather than having to incur the large capital expenses associated with scaling storage capacity using internal resources, companies are looking to leverage the economies of scale that Cloud Storage promises to be able to dynamically scale-on-demand their storage capacity (both up and down). This provides them with much greater flexibility and results in much better cost efficiencies since the Cloud Storage provider would most likely have volume purchasing economies that dwarf an individual company’s purchases. Cleversafe aligns with this strategy by providing an architecture that has the capability to scale to multiple petabytes—thereby taking advantage of the economies of scale associated with this amount of storage.
Summary
Therefore, although there are many skeptics today to the adoption of Cloud Storage, with the right technology partner these concerns can not only be alleviated, but the customer can fully realize the benefits that Cloud Storage offers. Limitless scalability enhanced security and greatly reduced capital and operating expenditures are feasible, and Cleversafe happens to be one of these technology partners that allows customers to best take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Storage.
[i] Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing – Pankesh Patel, Ajith Ranabahu, Amit Sheth; 2009
