Post Industry Event POV: It’s Clear Customers Are Fed Up with New Security “Add-Ons”

BOHH Labs VP of Business shares his thoughts on BOHH's attendance at the GDS Security Summit.

Last week BOHH Labs attended GDS’s Security Summit in Atlanta, GA.  The summit was well attended with CISO’s and VP’s of Security from global enterprise accounts in the finance, healthcare, manufacturing sectors etc.

It was evident that global enterprise accounts across all market sectors are looking for innovative ways of protecting their critical business and data assets.  The desire to move from data center to cloud is prevalent and often cost driven but mitigating the risk of data breaches is the main obstacle to be overcome by organizations. Additionally, as part of the discussion on security challenges, there is an increasing need to avoid further data breaches and meet new compliance regulations as Friday May 25, 2018 is fast approaching when the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes effective and impacts all global customers with European Union (EU) member customers.

One thing was made very clear: Companies and customers have been searching for new solutions and are keen to avoid buying another security solution that is layered on existing security investments. They are fed up with the security industry “add-ons” for promised enhanced security. The same old vendors are promising new and exciting solutions to protect companies and their data, yet time after time major breaches keep happening.

BOHH Labs was honored to take part in this industry discussion and present its new solution to help address the security challenges plaguing customers and organizations alike. We were delighted with the reaction to our new Secure Storage as a Service (SSaaS), which enables companies to protect compliant and confidential data fields while importantly enabling analytical insights to be gained without the risk of a data breach.

We demonstrated our service on a cloud platform to highlight how our solution is platform agnostic and show how compliant plus non-compliant data residing in a Hadoop data platform could be searched for analytical insights and the compliant data (i.e. PII, PHI) fields only being accessed by authorized users.

Seldom has the BOHH Labs team comprising of Simon Bain – CEO, Ken Hawkins – CTO and Alan Jamieson – VP Business Development seen such a positive and enthusiastic reaction to new technology.  Perhaps it was showing the Secure Storage as a Service working on a cloud platform and accessing data in a Hadoop data platform that validated how powerful and importantly how relevant our service is?  We left the summit upbeat with our message and solution resonating with most of the
conference attendees.

All in all it was a great industry event and if you want proof and to learn more, 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.

Stop Throwing Away Money on Data Storage (Even When Moving it to the Cloud)

- Alan Jamieson, BOHH Labs VP of Business Development

Does moving your data center storage to the Cloud (Private/Hybrid) help with saving operational costs on increasingly challenged IT budgets?  For most people, this is an automatic answer, yes; however, recent studies are indicating that moving storage from in-house to the Cloud won’t achieve cost savings unless the storage needs are fully assessed, and anticipated savings are planned out. This is alarming, and you may ask why?

Firstly, capacity planning is an issue: how much do we need today and in 12 months’ time?  Over-estimating storage capacity is one area that can make a dent in the savings. While estimating a higher capacity can secure better cloud storage rates from vendors, if you don’t have enough data to meet this higher capacity, you are essentially paying for unnecessary and wasted space.

Secondly, while over 80% of data centers have the storage capacity in-house, it is difficult to do routine checks, so when looking to switch and invest in Cloud storage, companies often don’t have the whole picture and can be making a choice that is often not financially beneficial. The fixed costs (electricity, cooling, licenses and maintenance) of running a data center and any spare storage or processing capacity is often overlooked when formulating your cloud migration/deployment strategy.

The volume and variety (structured and unstructured, regulated data etc.) we are collecting is increasingly on an annual basis.  Data is now seen as a business asset with new Chief Data Officer roles in enterprise accounts being created, but are we realizing the value of the data assets we have?

From research done by Jonathan Koomey in late 2017, only 25% of companies would save money if they transferred their server data directly onto the Cloud, whereas 75% would see an increase in annual costs. However, all the sample group would save if the companies migrated after quantifying out how much server space they need. This unnecessary Cloud storage spends costs companies around the world an estimated $62 billion annually.

If we step back from the cost of storage, the other important and increasing challenge for global companies is extracting the value from data that is stored in the Cloud and often is not accessible.  With the massive amount of data being produced daily, operational cost challenges are pushing companies to store data over 12 months or even more recent too soon. The world has become analytically focused; however, insight is only gained when data over a significant number of years is analyzed to extract the insight to achieve greater operational efficiencies, greater insight in how to retain your customers and how to improve the quality of manufactured parts.

Another research report puts the cost of Cloud waste at about 35%. So, for every dollar spent on Cloud resources, you only get $0.65 investment value. Now that we have addressed how companies are losing money, below are six ways your company/department can alleviate some of the wasted

Cloud spend:

1. Identify and retire abandoned applications – why store what is no longer needed?
2. Choose the right storage model – What is needed today and plan.
3.  Right-size instances – Invest in only what is needed.
4. Perform licensing audits – Do your software vendors enable your licenses to be used in the Cloud at no extra cost?
5. Automate server usage for peak/off peak hours – only pay the Cloud provider for services that are needed.
6. Pay upfront – Looking at license options could save more than purely monthly subscription fees.

While the global market is focused on enhancing how data is stored and embracing the benefits of making a transition to the Cloud, having a clear idea of want storage is needed and how often you need to access your data will ensure that you select the most cost-effective model for your business.

How to Flip Data Security into a Driver for Cloud Adoption, Not an Inhibitor

It’s no secret the Cloud brings enormous advantages to companies and the way they interact with data. Cloud environments offer companies the ability to share, store and access data from anywhere on any device at any time. As such, more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to their architecture strategies to enhance business agility, efficiency a new revenue stream, and let’s not forget the cost savings in terms of operations, personnel and technology updates.

To meet these demands, big data centers want to be able to open data access to the Cloud, yet organizations hold sensitive and protected personal information in their databases that they have a responsibility to keep protected, such as PHI (Protected Health Information), PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation) data that is held within them. Unfortunately, current database systems can encrypt stored data, but this encryption is carried out in a way that anyone (human or machine) that has access to the system at any administration level generally also has access to the plain unencrypted data. This design flaw leaves a “come get me” sign that has led to many diverse organizations becoming victims to data theft and losing millions of dollars.

This puts current data centers at a conundrum – Cloud-based data storage will help facilitate better use and collaboration of data housed, but the sensitive nature of the data and risk of breaching these compliance regulations is challenging adoption.

Security is still the most important concern for customers wanting to give Cloud access to their data stores. Now that we’ve seen how important data security is, what if you flip the switch and provide complete protection of Cloud data storage?

Strong risk management and data integrity systems can help companies avoid breaches and better manage disruption to operations, turning strong data security into a driver not an inhibitor for embracing Cloud environments.

But how does this work?

Enter Secure Storage as a Service. While the market has various related offerings: public Cloud, IaaS, PaaS, etc., secure data storage is not available. BOHH Labs is introducing a Bring your own storage (BYOS) capability which offers databases or specific file security that businesses desperately need. This enables on premise deployments to actively prioritize applications, databases or infrastructure to a lower cost, and secure cloud deployment without impacting user access.  Companies can choose which data to store with full knowledge of data confidentiality/ sensitivity.

Our solution removes the sensitive data from the source, storing it separately, enabling prioritization and control over sensitive data storage. This kills the flaws within the current storage market and enables stored data to be securely opened to the Cloud, without putting it at risk of breach, flipping the switch on data security making it a driver, not an inhibitor.