CLOUD

Gartner predicts that almost half of large enterprises will be engaged in a combined, public/private cloud operation, often described as "hybrid" cloud computing, three years from now. Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman makes the projection in his report, "Private Cloud Matures, Hybrid Cloud Is Next." The report implicitly assumes that the opposition to public cloud, which looms large in many enterprise IT surveys, will fall away in the near future, at least for limited hybrid operations.
AlertLogic published a “Cloud Security Report” in February 2014, with data drawn from 232,264 verified security incidents. The reports makes the case that “fears of the cloud being inherently insecure could largely be put to rest”. Once data is received by a Cloud Service Provider, encrypted and stored, we agree with the AlertLogic’s statement that companies have been finding that “clouds can potentially be more secure than traditional systems”. Companies and government agencies would like to extend their use of the cloud, however they are confronted with a number of challenges that are not or not sufficiently addressed by Cloud Service Providers today:

• Data security and encryption is a huge challenge, in particular protection “in flight” of data that is sent from an on premise systems to a Cloud Service Provider.
• Location and integrity of customer and other sensitive data.
• Control of data access.
• Visibility of data, files and information by the Cloud Service Providers’ employees and their systems.
• Insider threat from within the Cloud Service Provider.

Highly regulated industries, such as Financial Services, are even more reluctant to move data to the cloud, as are government agencies due to these challenges.

STEALTH Software addresses these challenges by providing a software-only solution for a number of (public and private) cloud scenario’s for SharePoint and .Net environments. STEALTH Content Store ensures that:

• Data is encrypted by the enterprise or government agency at the SharePoint server level and is protected “in flight” and “at rest”. As a result, data access and data storage is controlled by the customer at all times.
• The customer controls the location and integrity of the data. Data can be stored in multiple geographic locations, initiated and management at the SharePoint server level on premise. The software is vendor and storage platform independent.
• Data is protected “at rest”, only an encrypted Binary Large Object (BLOB) is stored in the cloud. A content ID that is “coupled” with the BLOB remains on premise with the customer. Each file is encrypted individually. The data is completely unintelligible, should an employee or bad actor at the Cloud Service Provider sent out an encrypted file to an external party or email address.