We’ve noted before that experts are forecasting 2010 as the year that cloud storage truly arrives, and the industry certainly is growing, as yet another cloud storage option recently went live - the SaaS company OpSource added a pay-as-you-go service. Last week we also picked up a benchmark of another sort: Cloud storage was mentioned in renowned Wall Street Journal writer Walter Mossberg’s Personal Technology column. Granted, it only earned a paragraph in the piece, which explains cloud computing for a general audience, but we took particular interest in his note on security.
Mossberg writes: “Many of these cloud services have good security, but prying hackers are relentless and smart, so consumers should be careful about what they store in the cloud.”
Of course, we would argue that with the Nasuni Filer, you do not have to be careful about what you send to the cloud. Thanks to end-to-end encryption, secure transmissions, unique credentials and more, customer data is safe and secure on the wire and in the cloud.
Speaking of the wire, this piece on Cloud Itch argues that companies are ready to take advantage of the new clouds, but have concerns about how to connect to them securely, reliably, and in a cost-effective way. The solution? He calls the products Cloud Storage Gateways, and recognizes Nasuni as one of the leaders in the new space.
Moving from the big picture to the backend, this post, which grew out of a slightly misguided debate on network-attached storage, highlights an interesting problem: the compatibility issues between CIFS (Windows Shares) and NFS (Unix Shares). Currently we only support CIFS on the Filer, for a number of reasons, including its stronger security model, but we are also looking at the need for NFS support. If you fall into that category, please let us know at feedback@nasuni.com; we would love to hear why.
Finally, George Crump of Storage Switzerland published a nice three-part piece on InformationWeek covering the cloud’s role in backup. (We’ve posted here about using the Filer for backup.) His assessment of the current state of encryption sparked a few thoughts, however. Yes, most vendors support encryption, but that does not mean they are all doing it correctly. It is easy to have encryption, but it is hard to do it right, with proper key management. Encryption is not a checkbox item. It is something you really need to understand and address properly. And we do.