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White Paper: Cleversafe for Mission Critical Data

January 2013

A White Paper providing context and guidance you can use

Inside:

Mission Critical Data is Big Data Scale As Large As You Want Lessons learned for your enterprise deployment

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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 profit margins, government and private organizations cannot afford to spend more to manage even the most essential information. Cleversafe offers a solution uniquely suited to storing the mission critical data of the modern enterprise. It offers infinitely 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, specifically for its role in storing mission critical data, and can help your organization handle its most vital information more efficiently and effectively.

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 firm, 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.

A White Paper for the Government IT Community

Cleversafe Scales Infinitely 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 off-the-shelf storage nodes leads to unlimited storage as you can easily add nodes as Cloud First your needs increase. Cleversafe also stores that data more efficiently, with a unique information dispersal architecture The Office of Management and Budget that uses only one minimally expanded instance of the data mandated in fiscal year 2011 that federal rather than multiple copies as in conventional RAID storage.
agencies must leverage cloud computing

Cleversafe uses object based storage, referencing objects by ID or file 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.

and/or make cloud computing part of new IT projects or be ready to justify why not. By fiscal year 2013, the policy requires agencies to provide specific details and road maps for adopting cloud-based technologies. For state and local agencies, many are recognizing the cost benefits of leveraging a cloud approach to providing IT services.

Securely Store and Access Your Most 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 defined 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 confidentiality and integrity are preserved even if individual slices are compromised. Secureslice also eliminated the need for key management

Leveraging the cloud as a means to offer 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 ten years. 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 traffic is also encrypted and, if the traffic 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 traffic will be Data Center Consolidation detected and discarded.
Do more with less. Clich as it sounds, this

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.

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 efficiencies. The elimination of duplicative systems alone can have a significant 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.

All of Your Data Whenever You Need 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 that the system is never down for scheduled maintenance.

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 first encrypted using AES-256, broken

Cleversafes PerfectBits also ensures that the data arrives down into equal size slices and dispersed unaltered and uncorrupted. It performs two levels of across a network of storage nodes. integrity checks, verifying each individual slice as well as the

A White Paper For The Federal IT Community

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

Increase Security, Scalability, and Reliability While Decreasing Costs

With shrinking budgets in government and industry, its hard to devote additional resources to even your most important data. You cannot afford to skimp on the security reliability of your critical data, and storing less of the information you need to complete your mission not an option. Cleversafe manages to increase the security, scalability, and reliability of your data while decreasing costs over 50%.

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, effectively 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 file, the higher the probability the file 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 files, a host of new risks are introduced that tend to negate the benefits of making copies. Each additional copy creates a security vulnerability, keeping files 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 file.

or is

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 five times. Cleversafe also simplifies 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 specific 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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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 simplified 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 afford to lose to hackers, maintenance, technical failures, hackers, or malicious insiders.

Concluding Thoughts
Systems like those provided by Cleversafe offer significant benefits to mission critical data and to the overall missions of federal, state and local agencies. For more on how these benefits 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.

A White Paper For The Federal IT Community

About the Authors

Bob 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 first 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 bob@crucialpointllc.com Ryan Kamauff is 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 Affairs. He researches and writes on developments in technology and government best practices.

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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 bob@crucialpointllc.com 703-994-0549 All information/data 2013 CTOLabs.com.

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