Sponsored By:
This is another in our series of sponsored podcasts with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), Co-Founder and CTO of RackTop Systems. You can hear more in Episode #147 on RansomWare protection and Episode #145 on proactive NAS security.
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has been touted as the next level of security for a while now. As such, it spans all of IT infrastructure. But from a storage perspective, it’s all about the latest NFS and SMB protocols together with an extreme level of security awareness that infuses storage systems.
RackTop has, from the git go, always focused on secure storage. ZTA with RackTop, adds on top of protocol logins an understanding of what normal IO looks like for apps, users, & admins and makes sure IO doesn’t deviate from what it should be. We discussed some of this in Episode #145, but this podcast provides even more detail. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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ZTA starts by requiring all participants in an IT infrastructure transaction to mutually authenticate one another. In modern storage protocols this is done via protocol logins. Besides logins, ZTA can establish different timeouts to tell servers and clients when to re-authenticate.
Furthermore, ZTA doesn’t just authenticate user/app/admin identity, it can also require that clients access storage only from authorized locations. That is, a client’s location on the network and in servers is also authenticated and when changed, triggers a system response. .
Also, with ZTA, PBAC/ABAC (policy/attribute based access controls) can be used to associate different files with different security policies. Above we talked about authentication timeouts and location requirements but PBAC/ABAC can also specify different authentication methods that need to be used.
RackTop systems does all of that and more. But where RackTop really differs from most other storage is that it support two modes of operation an observation mode and an enforcement mode. During observation mode, the system observes all the IO a client performs to characterizes its IO history.
Even during observation mode, RackTop has been factory pre-trained with what bad actor IO has looked like in the past. This includes all known ransomware IO, unusual user IO, unusual admin IO, etc. During observation mode, if it detects any of this bad actor IO, it will flagg and report it. For example, admins performing high read/write IO to multiple files will be detected as abnormal, flagged and reported.
But after some time in observation mode, admins can change RackTop into enforcement mode. At this point, the system understands what normal client IO looks like and if anything abnormal occurs, the system detects, flags and reports it.
RackTop customers have many options as to what the system will do when abnormal IO is detected. This can range from completely shutting down client IO to just reporting and logging it.
Jonathan mentioned that RackTop is widely installed in multi-level security enviroments. For example, in many government agencies, it’s not unusual to have top secret, secret, and unclassified information, each with their own PBAC/ABAC enforcement criteria.
RackTop has a long history of supporting storage for these extreme security environments. As such, customers should be well assured that their data can be as secured as any data in national government agencies.
Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder & CTO RackTop Systems
onathan Halstuch is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RackTop Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Georgia Tech as well as a master’s degree in engineering and technology management from George Washington University.
With over 20-years of experience as an engineer, technologist, and manager for the federal government he provides organizations the most efficient and secure data management solutions to accelerate operations while reducing the burden on admins, users, and executives.