There are basically four ways of provisioning cloud storage accounts today. You can sign up with a cloud storage provider and do it all yourself, but then you end up writing data to the cloud without all the added features of a gateway. You forego thin-provisioning, snapshots, encryption, etc.
The second option is to choose a cloud storage provider, set up an account, engage in an agreement, establish your payment method, and then configure your gateway product to use your account. This is not always an easy task. With this method, you end up managing relationships with two different companies and, among other things, the question of who to call when something goes wrong gets more complex. There’s a chance each company will point at the other guy if something goes awry.
The third choice is what we like to refer to as the proxy model. In this setup, the gateway company sits between you and the cloud. Your data flows encrypted to that host, but it is unencrypted upon landing there. It is exposed to that company’s employees, which means you have to trust them. As we have said before, strong security should never rely on trust.
The proxy model introduces reliability issues, since you’re essentially counting on this intermediary to be as reliable as the robust backing cloud. Performance can suffer because the data has to take extra hops en route to the cloud. Data ownership issues arise as your files flow through these extra channels. Finally, there are questions about where your data ends up, exactly. Is it pooled in with hundreds of other customers? What happens if one of these accounts is compromised? Will you be exposed too?
Nasuni offers a fourth option that differs from all of the above methods. We give customers a direct link to cloud storage, but without the administrative hassles, huge performance hits, or security concerns. Nasuni does not stand between our customers and the cloud. Customers have their own encryption keys and a unique set of cloud credentials for each provider they use with the Filer. This ensures that their data is not mixed in with other customers’ files.
To make this possible, we have had to work very closely with our cloud storage partners, occasionally pushing them outside their comfort zones. For example, one of our providers does not yet offer an account creation API, so we used a great piece of open source software, Selenium, to create a tool that automatically creates new customer accounts with unique credentials every sixty seconds. It so happens that this partner verifies each of these sign-ups with a phone call, so when they saw Nasuni creating an account every minute while we were sitting back enjoying some coffee, their support team was a little bent out of shape. Yet we always make sure our partners agree with our approach, and we did have pre-approval from the business team, so eventually we ironed things out. In the end we secured 100 new accounts with unique credentials for that cloud.
Now, when a new Nasuni customer or trial user chooses this cloud storage provider, the Filer automatically pulls down one of those accounts with its unique credentials. This account then belongs to that customer for life. If they decide to stop doing business with Nasuni, they can take that account and walk. And if they choose not to take it, we wait a pre-specified number of days (laid out in our EULA) in case they decide to return, and then destroy the account and the data.
But we don’t think they will. We’re confident that our customers will see that what we offer, in terms of security, performance and convenience, is completely unique.
We are the only gateway system that offers automatic cloud provisioning, and we have worked to become a true one-stop-shop. We do all the backend work for our customers in terms of setting up an account with the cloud, handling the billing, etc. All our customers do is pick that initial cloud. They deal with one product, and if something goes wrong, they don’t have to worry about whether to call Nasuni or their chosen cloud storage provider. They know to call us.
Experience a true gateway to cloud storage by downloading a free trial copy of the Filer today.