Category Archives: Disaster Recovery

Rethinking File Security Fundamentals

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I took a week off blogging last week but the lazy days were inundated by bad news. A few more devastating ransomware attacks. This time, Colonial Pipeline in the US was hacked and its networks were shutdown by ransomware. These ransomware threats are never ending, and they are getting more damaging than ever. It is like trying to plug a leaking boat with your hands, and more leaks appear as you plug them.

More ransomware news hitting healthcare around the world last week:

We are forever chasing for a solution, forever losing because almost all technology defenses to protect the data against ransomware are reactive. Why is ransomware still such a big threat then?  Time to rethink file security fundamentals.

Data everywhere

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The other pandemic – Datanemic

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It is a disaster. No matter what we do, the leaks and the cracks are appearing faster than we are fixing it. It is a global pandemic.

I am not talking about COVID-19, the pandemic that has affected our lives and livelihood for over a year. I am talking about the other pandemic – the compromise of security of data.

In the past 6 months, the data leaks, the security hacks, the ransomware scourge have been more devastating than ever. Here are a few big ones that happened on a global scale:

Data Security Breach, Cyber Attack, Ransomware

Closer to home, here in South East Asia, we have

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Multicloud is sprouting Storage Silos

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Grain Silos

We get an avalanche of multicloud selling from storage vendors. We get promises and benefits of multicloud but from whose point of view?

Multicloud is multiple premises

This is an overly simplistic example how I created 3 copies of the same spreadsheet yesterday. I have a quotation on Google Sheets. A fairly complicated one. Someone wanted it in Excel format, but the format and the formulas were all messed up when I tried to download it as XLSX. What I had to do was to download the Google Sheets as ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) format to my laptop, and then upload the LibreOffice file to my OneDrive account, and use Excel Online to open the ODS file and saved as XLSX. In one fell swoop, I have the same spreadsheet in Google Drive, my laptop and OneDrive. 3 copies in 3 different premises. 

As we look to the behaviour of data creation and data acquisition, data sharing and data movement, the central repository is the gold image, the most relevant copy of the data. However, for business reasons, data has to be moved to where the applications are. It could be in cloud A or cloud B or cloud C or it could be on-premises. The processed output from cloud A is stored in cloud A, and likewise, cloud B in cloud B and so on.

To get the most significant and relevant copy, data from all premises must be consolidated, thus it has to be moved to a centralized data storage repository. But intercloud data movement is bogged down by egress fees, latency, data migration challenges (like formats and encoding), security, data clearance policies and many other hoops and hurdles.

With all these questions and concerns in mind, the big question mark is “Is multicloud really practical?” From a storage guy like me who loves a great data management story, “It is not. Multicloud creates storage silos“.

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Fueling the Flywheel of AWS Storage

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It was bound to happen. It happened. AWS Storage is the Number 1 Storage Company.

The tell tale signs were there when Silicon Angle reported that AWS Storage revenue was around USD$6.5-7.0 billion last year and will reach USD$10 billion at the end of 2021. That news was just a month ago. Last week, IT Brand Pulse went a step further declaring AWS Storage the Number 1 in terms of revenue. Both have the numbers to back it up.

AWS Logo

How did it become that way? How did AWS Storage became numero uno?

Flywheel juggernaut

I became interested in the Flywheel concept some years back. It was conceived in Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great” almost 20 years ago, and since then, Amazon.com has become the real life enactment of the Flywheel concept.

Amazon.com Flywheel – How each turn becomes sturdier, brawnier.

Every turn of the flywheel requires the same amount of effort although in the beginning, the noticeable effect is minuscule. But as every turn gains momentum, the returns of each turn scales greater and greater to the fixed efforts of operating a single turn.

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TrueNAS – The Secure Data Platform for EasiShare

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The Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) EasiShare presence is growing rapidly in the region, as enterprises and organizations are quickly redefining the boundaries of the new workspace. Work files and folders are no longer confined to the shared network drives within the local area network. It is going beyond to the “Work from Anywhere” phenomenon that is quickly becoming the way of life. Breaking away from the usual IT security protection creates a new challenge, but EasiShare was conceived with security baked into its DNA. With the recent release, Version 10, file sharing security and resiliency are stronger than ever.

[ Note: I have blogged about EasiShare previously. Check out the 2 links below ]

Public clouds are the obvious choice but for organizations to protect their work files, and keep data secure, services like Dropbox for Business, Microsoft® Office 365 with OneDrive and Google® Workspace are not exactly the kind of file sharing with security as their top priority. A case in point was the 13-hour disruption to Wasabi Cloud last week, where the public cloud storage provider’s domain name, wasabisys.com, was suspended by their domain name registrar because of malware discrepancy at one of its endpoints. There were other high profile cases too.

This is where EasiShare shines, because it is a secure, private EFSS solution for the enterprise and beyond, because business resiliency is in the hands and control of the organization that owns it, not the public cloud service providers.

EasiShare unifies with TrueNAS for secure business resiliency

EasiShare is just one several key business solutions iXsystems™ in Asia Pacific Japan is working closely with, and there is a strong, symbiotic integration with the TrueNAS® platform. Both have strong security features that fortify business resiliency, especially when facing the rampant ransomware scourge.

Value of a Single Unified Data Services Platform

A storage array is not a solution. It is just a box that most vendors push to sell. A storage must be a Data Services Platform. Readers of my blog would know that I have spoken about the Data Services Platform 3 years ago and you can read about it:

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Ransomware recovery with TrueNAS ZFS snapshots

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This is really an excuse to install and play around with TrueNAS® CORE 12.0.

I had a few “self assigned homework exercises” I have to do this weekend. I was planning to do a video webcast with an EFSS vendor soon, and the theme should be around ransomware. Then one of the iXsystems™ resellers, unrelated to the first exercise, was talking about this ransomware messaging yesterday after we did a technical training with them. And this weekend is coming on a bit light as well. So I thought I could bring all these things, including checking out the TrueNAS® CORE 12.0, together in a video (using Free Cam), of which I would do for the first time as well. WOW! I can kill 4 birds with one stone! All together in one blog!

It could be Adam Brown 89 or worse

Trust me. You do not want AdamBrown89 as your friend. Or his thousands of ransomware friends.

When (not if) you are infected by ransomware, you get a friendly message like this in the screenshot below. I got this from a local company who asked for my help a few months ago.

AdamBrown89 ransomware message

AdamBrown89 ransomware message

I have written about this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become a gold mine for ransomware attackers, and many entry level NAS products are heavily inflicted with security flaws and vulnerabilities. Here are a few notable articles in year 2020 alone. [ Note: This has been my journal of the security flaws of NAS devices from 2020 onwards ]

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Storage in a shiny multi-cloud space

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The multi-cloud for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) era is not here (yet). That is what the technology marketers want you to think. The hype, the vapourware, the frenzy. It is what they do. The same goes to technology analysts where they describe vision and futures, and the high level constructs and strategies to get there. The hype of multi-cloud is often thought of running applications and infrastructure services seamlessly in several public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft® Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and linking it to on-premises data centers and private clouds. Hybrid is the new black.

Multicloud connectivity to public cloud providers and on-premises private cloud

Multi-Cloud, on-premises, public and hybrid clouds

And the aspiration of multi-cloud is the right one, when it is truly ready. Gartner® wrote a high level article titled “Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy“. To take advantage of each individual cloud’s strengths and resiliency in respective geographies make good business sense, but there are many other considerations that cannot be an afterthought. In this blog, we look at a few of them from a data storage perspective.

In the beginning there was … 

For this storage dinosaur, data storage and compute have always coupled as one. In the mainframe DASD days. these 2 were together. Even with the rise of networking architectures and protocols, from IBM SNA, DECnet, Ethernet & TCP/IP, and Token Ring FC-SAN (sorry, this is just a joke), the SANs, the filers to the servers were close together, albeit with a network buffered layer.

A decade ago, when the public clouds started appearing, data storage and compute were mostly inseparable. There was demarcation of public clouds and private clouds. The notion of hybrid clouds meant public clouds and private clouds can intermix with on-premise computing and data storage but in almost all cases, this was confined to a single public cloud provider. Until these public cloud providers realized they were not able to entice the larger enterprises to move their IT out of their on-premises data centers to the cloud convincingly. So, these public cloud providers decided to reverse their strategy and peddled their cloud services back to on-prem. Today, Amazon AWS has Outposts; Microsoft® Azure has Arc; and Google Cloud Platform launched Anthos.

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Valuing the security value of NAS storage

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Garmin paid, reportedly millions. Do you sleep well at night knowing that the scourge of ransomware is rampant and ever threatening your business. Is your storage safe enough or have you invested in a storage which was the economical (also to be known as cheap) to your pocket?

Garmin was hacked by ransomware

I have highlighted this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become the goldmine for ransomware. And in the mire of this COVID-19 pandemic, the lackadaisical attitude of securing the NAS storage remains. Too often than not, end users and customers, especially in the small medium enterprises segment, continue to search for the most economical NAS storage to use in their business.

Is price the only factor?

Why do customers and end users like to look at the price? Is an economical capital outlay of a cheap NAS storage with 3-year hardware and shallow technical support that significant to appease the pocket gods? Some end users might decided to rent cloud file storage, Hotel California style until they counted the 3-year “rental” price.

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Resilient Integrated Data Protection against Ransomware

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Early in the year, I wrote about NAS systems being a high impact target for ransomware. I called NAS a goldmine for ransomware. This is still very true because NAS systems are the workhorses of many organizations. They serve files and folders and from it, the sharing and collaboration of Work.

Another common function for NAS systems is being a target for backups. In small medium organizations, backup software often direct their backups to a network drive in the network. Even for larger enterprise customers too, NAS is the common destination for backups.

Backup to NAS system

Typical NAS backup for small medium organizations.

Backup to Data Domain with NAS Protocols

Backup to Data Domain with NAS (NFS, CIFS) Protocols

Ransomware is obviously targeting the backup as another high impact target, with the potential to disrupt the rescue and the restoration of the work files and folders.

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