Cyberstorage: Leveraging the Multi-Cloud to Combat Data Exfiltration

Mar 30, 2023The Hacker NewsData Security / Encryption

Multi-cloud data storage, once merely a byproduct of the great
cloud migration, has now become a strategy for data management.
“Multi-cloud by design,” and its companion the supercloud, is an
ecosystem in which several cloud systems work together to provide
many organizational benefits, including increased scale and overall
resiliency.

And now, even security teams who have long been the holdout on
wide-scale cloud adoption, may find a reason to rejoice. Born out
of the multi-cloud approach, cyberstorage enables companies to not
only enjoy the benefits that multi-cloud brings but also eliminate
the risk of data exposure at the same time, marking the beginning
of the multi-cloud maturity era.

What Is The Supercloud?

While many organizations ended up with multiple cloud services
as a byproduct of interdepartmental needs, today organizations are
intentionally building multi-cloud environments. And rather than
manage the various cloud services individually, many are
implementing an abstraction layer that sits above the hyperscale
infrastructure to combine and collaborate cloud repositories
together for a singular purpose.

This ecosystem is referred to as the supercloud. How
organizations are using the supercloud is unique to their use case
but the benefits to adopters are many: increased flexibility in
accessing data, streamlined operations for DevSecOps teams,
increased scale and power from multiple storage providers, reduced
risk in single-point-of-failure should one cloud provider suffer an
outage.

Cyberstorage: Leveraging Multi-Cloud for Increased Data
Security

Whether the multi-cloud environment came by design or not, one
thing remains constant: security teams are weary of wide-scale
cloud adoption. And with good reason. As ransomware attacks
continue to rise at a 13% growth rate year over year, surely more
cloud storage simply equals more data vulnerability gaps to fill,
right? New developments in data technology address these concerns.
Adopting the concept of the supercloud, cyberstorage^[1]
can create a virtual layer on top of the disparate cloud
repositories, adding unique security controls that actually benefit
from multi-cloud storage sprawl.

Cyberstorage, the fusion of high-performance security with
accessible storage, entered the data security scene in 2022 when
Gartner coined the category. The technology is purpose-built to
withstand ransomware and other malware attacks on data repositories
with proactive technology to better block and respond to attacks as
they happen, such as the ability to self-heal and recover
compromised data, and native safeguards at the data-level that
secure it against exposure and exfiltration even when perimeter
defenses have been breached. While there are several approaches to
cyberstorage, solutions that employ a data harbor^[2]
specifically leverage the multi-cloud to improve data security.

How Cyberstorage Protects Against Ransomware and Data
Exfiltration

Data exfiltration^[3], now replacing the
pay-to-decrypt ransomware monetization tactic, is a daily fear for
security teams. Stolen data has been a boon for ransomware actors
as the threat of exposure and publication increases the leverage
against the victimized organization, forcing their hand to pay
increasingly higher ransoms to maintain the integrity of their
data. Recent notorious exfiltration attacks, including 2022’s
LastPass breach in which encrypted backups and MFA policies were
stolen along with sensitive customer data, spurred industry-wide
discourse about the fundamental vulnerability: data that is
networked in its complete state can never be safe from breach. Even
common data-level safeguards such as encryption and MFA were
undermined in this case.

Cyberstorage solutions that utilize a data harbor solve this
critical design flaw. Data is fragmented and distributed across
the multiple storage locations^[4]
that make up the data harbor – and then instantly reassembled for
use. This means that exfiltration attempts in the cloud would only
render meaningless fragments of data for the culprit, and never the
full, usable data set. The more data locations and cloud vendors
added to the data harbor, the higher the company’s resilience is
against attack. Only the data harbor holds the keys to piecing the
data back together. And since a data harbor has built-in
redundancies, it can self-heal from an attack or outage perpetrated
on any single cloud repository.

Explosive Growth Expected as Multi-Cloud Adoption Reaches
Maturity

It is a sign of market maturity that security architecture is
being designed to fit into the framework of the multi-cloud
environment, rather than bolted on afterward. Cyberstorage
solutions recognize the growing trend toward interconnected
“supercloud” infrastructure and provide a solution to work within
this foundation. Leveraging the multi-cloud infrastructure,
cyberstorage can increase the organization’s security posture,
safeguarding data against ransomware and exfiltration. And for this
reason, it is predicted that the category will grow by 6x over the
next three years as companies start to implement anti-ransomware
technology right onto the data storage layer.

Note: Paul Lewis, the Founder & CEO of Calamu, has
written and contributed to this article.