The storage community is finally waking up to security. ESG Research indicates that over 40% of storage professionals are reviewing their storage security procedures or looking closer at encryption technologies in response to the recent highly-publicized security breaches at Bank of America and Citibank.
John Ottsik, Enterprise Storage Group
Nexsan Assureon Technology | Performance | Connectivity | What Environment Best fits Nexsan Assureon | Configuration Overview
Nexsan Assureon
Nexsan's AssureonTM is a storage system for businesses that need to comply with the more stringently enforced regulations or for organizations that can't afford to compromise company assets and suffer the consequences of loss in business continuity.
Every organization needs secure affordable storage for protecting valuable company assets such as fixed content and reference data. The traditional content management systems either backup or archive to unintelligent and non-secure storage devices. It is the responsibility of every good business or organization to protect its company's assets, and to ensure the privacy and confidentiality for sensitive content such as customer information, employee records, financial reports, contracts, medical records, etc.
Nexsan's AssureonTM is the first secure content management storage system is that is designed to store, manage, protect, and provide Information Lifecycle Management for all forms of electronic records using Content Addressable Storage (CAS) technology. CAS technology eliminates multiple copies of the same file from being stored, and significantly reduces costs for operating and maintaining the long-term retention and disposition of business assets.
Contact CUC to discuss your specific needs.
Why should your business use Assureon?
When sensitive and confidential information is compromised due to theft, accidental loss, or employee tampering, the costs for damages are very high. It not just the costs of lawsuits and attorney fees, but it the loss customer confidence and satisfaction. If a business cannot secure its company assets, it will eventually suffer from a loss of business continuity. Loss of business continuity is disastrous, and generally leads to bankruptcy.
Security breaches, tampering with authentic electronic records, exposing confidential patient information or customer information is making headline news every week. What we hear is that it is an insidious problem, and the best practices of companies for managing valuable and sensitive assets are failing. Investors, customers and regulatory agencies are demanding higher levels of security for data protection and better auditing processes of all data under content storage management. Businesses no longer have a choice because compliance with major regulations is mandating better standards for content management. In the U.S. there are regulations such as SEC 17-4a, HIPPA, CFR21 part 11 FDA, and Sarbanes-Oxley to guide and provide a new content management infrastructure to help resolve the problems of the past.
How Nexsan Assureon Technology Works
The AssureonTM Storage Content Management System is a plug and play solution designed to fit the requirements any size business or organization. Its storage scales from a few terabytes to petabytes using very high density and cost-effective storage devices such as:
- Nexsan SATABeastTM disk storage - 21TB in a 4U rack enclosure
- Nexsan SATABladeTM disk storage - 4TB in a 1U rack enclosure
- Plasmon UDO optical storage - 30GB per removable disk
AssureonTM is the only CAS solution that supports disk, optical, and tape storage devices.
AssureonTM not only scales in storage capacity, but independently scales in compute performance as user and application requirements grow. The scaling architecture of Assureon™ uses a clustering technology that permits the content management system to grow with the needs of the business.
If AssureonTM is managing mission critical data, the AssureonTM content management system can be configured to be fully fault tolerant and ensure the highest level of service for business continuity. Assureon™ self-diagnostic and self-healing capabilities assures the safety of all assets under its management; absolute redundancy; no single point of failure; ongoing data integrity checking with self healing; RAID protection with phone home capability.
| Single Instance Store: Assureon's CAS technology provides single instance store. Based on the unique content of a file, a "fingerprint" is created for each file. The "fingerprint" uniquely identifies each file and eliminates multiple instances of a file from being stored. Metadata files are created for multiple instances, so all the standard file system information is retained and usable for file assess and retrieval. In addition the metadata files store Assureon™ information for retention and disposition rules, encryption and compression, etc. | File Level Retention Enforcement: Assureon enforces retention polices at the object level allowing different retention periods to be placed on files based upon content management needs of individual or groups within the organization. |
| Authentication and Integrity: Assureon utilizes time-stamps, serialization and encryption technology to verify that all records and file metadata have not been tampered with or corrupted while under management by Assureon. | Assignment of Retention Periods: Assureon utilizes a File System Watcher program to monitor and apply retention rules at the directory level of the file system. This approach is simple and provides the greatest flexibility for managing content with or without pre-existing third party record management systems. |
| Immutability: Assureon guarantees that an object placed under Assureon management cannot be changed or erased until the end of its retention period. | Access Speed: Assureon enables immediate online access to files utilizing fast high density auto-MAID disk storage. |
| WORM functionality: Assureon system is the only system that provides Write Once, Read Many functionality for disk, optical and tape devices. When an encrypted file stored on WORM reaches the end of its retention period its encryption keys are destroyed, so the file is no longer accessible or readable. | Enabling ILM: Assureon is a powerful tool that utilizes a rules based engine to automate the operational steps of classifying, placing, protecting, archiving, accessing, and expiring of files under its management. |
| Business Continuity Protection: Assureon supports remote replication of assets across the WAN and can be configured to keep duplicate files at a remote site. Assureon clustering technology provides full fault-tolerance for mission critical applications or disaster recovery. | Audit Trail reports for Compliance: Assureon meets all the major requirements of the compliance laws and privacy
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| Fail-safe CAS Technology: Assureon utilizes a dual cryptographic process (MD5 and SHA-1 hashing algorithms) to create its unique CAS address, which ensures the integrity of the file and no loss of information through potential data collisions. |
Most CAS storage solutions don't offer data encryption. It is no longer good business practice to store confidential or sensitive data in a clear text format. It seems like every major corporation is losing data accidentally or from theft. File encryption with Assureon is simple to do. It ensures privacy and protects against data theft or from accidental loss of removable media. Assureon implements encryption on a file by file basis using the AES-256 encryption standard. Each file has its own unique key, which is transparently and automatically handled by Assureon's secure key manager.
Secure Key Management: The management of encryption keys is critical to data protection. Key management needs to be secure from attack and also from inadvertent corruption by insiders or physical theft of the hardware that contains the keys. Assureon's automated encryption key management system has secure replication backup process that safeguards the keys against loss. Assureon provides support for multiple offsite repositories of keys. Even the keys themselves are encrypted, so offsite key management is not a security threat.
Assureon's architecture is designed for scalability - processing or compute performance scale independently from the storage capacity requirements. Storage capacity can be vastly increased if needed and more Assureon processing nodes can be added to the configuration for faster performance independent of each other. As more storage and/or processing nodes are added, the Assureon software automatically identifies the nodes, and automatically balances the load across all the nodes for maximum system throughput.
This allows the greatest flexibility for meeting the changing requirements of a growing organization. It always hard to predict the future, so independence in growth of processing power and storage capacity guarantees a lower cost of ownership. There is nothing more costly than scaling a system that ties its processing power to its storage capacity.
Contact CUC to discuss your specific needs.
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