Cisco Plans Storage Security Push

Cisco Systems plans a fabric-based encryption offering for disk and tape later this year that the company says bests current approaches.

The product will be delivered in the second half of the year, but Cisco has been conducting preliminary briefings to let customers know it’s coming and will issue a press release on the offering next week.

Doug Anderson, product manager of Cisco’s Data Center Business Unit, said that of the possible locations to encrypt data — on the host or tapes, via appliances or on the storage network fabric — Cisco chose to deliver its Storage Media Encryption (SME) of data at rest as a SANfabric-based service, integrating it into the network so it doesn’t require network changes or new equipment.

Data encryption has become “top of mind for customers,” said Anderson. One reason is the need to comply with data protection and retention regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. Another reason is cost: dealing with a lost customer record costs a company $90 without encryption, compared to just $6 if the data is encrypted, said Anderson, citing Gartner.

Anderson said Cisco’s approach minimizes latency and maximizes performance, integrates with existing hardware, software and data center management practices, and provides the flexibility to deliver encryption when and where it’s needed.

The service will be delivered as a module in Cisco’s modular and semi-modular MDS 9500 and 9200 Fibre Channel switches. The first products will encrypt tape and virtual tape (VTL), with encryption for heterogeneous disk storage arrays to be added at a later date.

Anderson said Cisco is working actively on standards and with partners’ APIs to make key management highly available. The solution will be IEEE 1619 AES256 compliant, the company says.

Cisco says the heterogeneous solution can also encrypt traffic from any virtual SAN (VSAN), with automatic load balancing across multiple SANs, and Cisco Fabric Manager and a command line interface (CLI) approach performs provisioning, key and user management with no need for additional management software. The hardware will also support other SAN services and features.

Cisco says its approach gives it performance, flexibility, scalability and ease of management that host, appliance and storage device-based approaches don’t offer. The company also plans advanced security certifications for the offering.

Cisco isn’t the only storage switch vendor making news this week. Arch rival Brocade claimed at the Storage Decisions show in Chicago this week that its 48000 Director is two to three times more efficient than the Cisco MDS 9513.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020