17 This week we launch the latest version of our software-defined storage solution, Scality RING. Scality RING today supports well over one hundred mission-critical customer deployments at petabyte scale—many of them up to several dozen petabytes and growing. Our customers depend on Scality RING for storing their data reliably with continuous availability for 24×7 access from tens of millions of aggregate users. Moreover, with the introduction of our native RING Scale-out File System (SOFS) back in 2013, we can now power use cases requiring access from both modern object-style interfaces such as AWS S3 API and legacy applications that depend on access using traditional file protocols like NFS and SMB – all in a single solution. The Scality RING user community includes leading financial services and banking organizations, cloud providers, telcos, healthcare institutions, and brand-name media companies. Our open source initiative (launched June 2016) recently crossed a significant milestone of nearly 500,000 downloads in a little over a year. Now we also serve a wide audience of developers creating new data-centric applications. Is your Data Safe? Entering 2017, the topic of IT security was at the forefront of the news, with seemingly weekly reports involving breaches, viruses, and malware. Within the last month, several highly visible—and damaging—ransomware attacks have taken place. An enterprise storage system such as Scality RING is typically deployed in a secure fashion behind purpose-built cyber security infrastructures. However, as a last line of defense and in order to protect digital assets that may contain highly sensitive data, we have invested significantly in delivering a feature set in Scality RING7 that help assure secure cloud deployments both in the enterprise and service provider environments. Features such as data versioning offer protection against events that attempt to modify or erase file data by providing a mechanism to restore the state of the files (or objects) prior to the event. The ability to enable write once read many (WORM) type protection on files and objects also provides additional layers of protection against malicious or merely accidental access. Deploying data across multiple data centers, especially geographically distant ones, can further enhance the security of data by reducing the probability that multiple sites will suffer in a single event. These features have been added to Scality RING’s existing encryption, secure authentication, and comprehensive access control mechanisms already in use by customers deploying previous RING releases. Secure File and Object Cloud Data storage is evolving. Enterprise customers tell us they see value in maintaining on-premises storage for best performance, control, and cost-efficiency. Nonetheless, most CIOs are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy that includes the use of private and public-cloud storage services. We see an emerging set of use cases that can securely provide a bridge from on-premises storage to public cloud. This can enhance workflows by seamlessly moving data between clouds and leveraging the most effective services available within each cloud. Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud harnesses the power of thousands of cloud compute instances for analytics, simulations, or media transcoding. It can also leverage built-in cloud services for content distribution applications. Enabling secure on-premises storage as part of a total cybersecurity solution for enterprises provides a foundation for embracing hybrid cloud IT strategies in the coming years. Scality RING7 is ready to take on this vision and challenge! Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
