With Storage Solutions on the Brink of Disaster, Analytics Cannot Work

Yes, I said it. Storage solutions are on the brink of disaster. They are costing companies money, while moving to the Cloud can compromise data security and leads to potentially valuable data being lost or unable to be used. The same old vendors are promising new and exciting solutions to protect, manipulate, and visualize your data. In the past they promised Big Data Lakes of usable information enabling analytics. Today, it is Artificial Intelligence (AI) with security and learning capabilities  placed on your data. But, they failed in the past. Is today any different?

What is missing is a solution that enables secure, real-time data access and secures all compliant data held within storage systems without any impact to the user experience or putting the data at risk. Enter BOHH Labs – we are introducing Secure Storage as a Service to address these needs.

So why are we any different? We believe in privacy. Privacy of the individual with GDPR and PII, privacy of health records with PHI, and privacy of the state and corporation with secret and sensitive data being stored correctly. However, we also believe that data is an asset and has a value companies should be able to strategically leverage without fear that sensitive data will be leaked, lost, or stolen.

This all sounds great, but first we must look at what has gotten our industry to a place where storage is about to implode.

Storage. It is an old technology with a big future. Why? Because we need it for lots of reasons: from having somewhere to place our existing application data, archive storage, document & Image storage and videos.

We Need Storage.

Add to that the fact that we as a digital society produce a massive amount of data daily that needs to be housed somewhere, meaning that we have lots of data. Big amounts you may say. Apart from current data having immediate requirements, the analytical value of our historical data is enormous and can be deployed everywhere from sales cycles to help organizations plan better, to health data to see how well a specific treatment has worked over the past decade. If used correctly then this Big Data (yep 10 years of data can be classed as Big) can have a useful purpose and become an organizational profit center in its own right.

As such, storage solutions peaked in demand. And, as always when a market is in demand, vendors jumped on this market to sell promising solutions that would ostensibly provide businesses with competitive advantage, with the first major wave focusing on Big Data enabling valuable analytics.

Big Data Analytics.

One of the many overly hyped-up terms, Big Data Analytics was big in 2015. But now? Not so much. Why? Well it could be for many reasons:

1.      It was always a marketing hype. We have data in many huge storage silos. Why name it?

2.     The hype could never live up to the use cases. Hadoop, great storage, not so great for data usage.

3.     Why do we need it separated out? Data is data. Big data, small data lakes, ponds, puddles. It is data and it has a use, a value and is required.

It was the only thing people talked about years ago, with planes trailing banners and television adverts stating how it would change our lives.     But now… Naturally, when a fad dies, a new one begins. Enter AI.

AI.

Well when it comes to hype, AI is king pin. However, unlike Big Data, it is for good reasons. While AI is currently being over-hyped as a technology savior, it can actually help us in many ways, especially with storage needs, the security of data and the use one can extract of it. But will AI alone be a fix to our storage solution needs? No.

This brings us to Security. Everything above is all well and good, but storing data for the sake of it is expensive. Placing AI onto a store and learning from the data is a worthy cause but then turning it into a profit center through use becomes problematic, due to the increase in regulations and the information held within the data. Whether it be PHI (Protected Health Information), PII (Personal Identifiable Information), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), or data that is secret to an organization or government that must not be let in to the public domain. Using stored data with any of this information as part of it can be costly if that data is accidentally or maliciously leaked.

Secure Storage as A Service

This is where BOHH Labs can step in and help. Our Secure Storage as A Service (SSaaS) acts as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data store and enables total security on all your stored data, without changing the data structure, while making certain data points visible only to those with the correct permissions. Whether this is in a database or a document, the BOHH SSaaS enables full use of data without the security or accessibility concerns.

Our solution uniquely offers database or specific field level security. All data that needs to be secured is removed from the source, encrypting it and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control over sensitive data such as PHI, PII or GDPR. We do this because it stops the inside hacking job. If the database does not contain the data, then a malicious actor who has gained root or admin privileges cannot run a simple query on the data, extract it, and have it available to them to sell to whoever they like, unlike traditional TDE Data Encryption or homomorphic encryption technologies! Also, the original data structure is maintained which helps negate the needs for costly application updates.

Traditional Data Masking solutions and TDE Data File encryption solutions do not hide your data. It can remain visible in its original format to inside threats. While application level security may have thwarted the hackers of the 90’s and early 2000’s, it does nothing against today’s more sophisticated hackers. BOHH Securely hides your data, making it inaccessible to bad actors, whether internal or external. In this way your data becomes usable by a wider audience without compromising your analytics and without the risk of PII, PHI, GDPR or other sensitive data being leaked or accessed. This same process can also be utilized on document and email stores, allowing your analytics engines to work on your entire storage not just a small subset!

We believe that BOHH is the only organization that is able to secure your data, without leaving a neon sign above an unlocked backdoor. Traditional security measures, such as TDE, Homomorphic encryption, Data Masking, and Application Level Security have proven ineffectual and left your data at risk, and in many cases your organization at risk of legal ramifications. Just look at the theft of data over the past 2 years!

BOHH works on all current data stores, document stores, and email systems; it works in the background without impeding users and enables you to work with your data without risk of theft or malicious data manipulation. BOHH has been architected in a way that does not compromise speed and that is infinitely scalable. If you want proof, and why wouldn’t you? After all you have heard all of this before and yet …  Contact us and we will be happy to place a POC on your storage system, to show how we secure, scale and enable easy access to your valuable information stores.