Businesses in virtually every industry need access to secure, reliable data storage to manage their operations. While the emergence of highly scalable storage platforms like Ceph has allowed data storage to become more secure and efficient, many of these technologies are complex and difficult to manage for the average enterprise. Thankfully, businesses like croit have risen as the answer to making this technology more accessible to more organizations.

One of the defining characteristics of Ceph is that it is an open-source software platform, meaning it is developed and maintained by an organized community that provides the software without charge to organizations with the skills to install and operate it. This has given birth to several companies and platforms whose purpose is to deliver Ceph's open-source software to consumers in a way that is more accessible, including croit.

An accessible platform for advanced data storage solutions

The mission of croit is to make open-source storage easy. That means giving more organizations access to the economics, reliability, and scalability of Ceph without the need for a large number of rare Ceph experts.

"Ceph provides a highly-scalable, low-cost general-purpose object, file, and block storage solution," says Martin Verges, CEO of croit. "The croit software appliance supports every application virtualization platform, including Kubernetes, eliminating the need for different storage systems for different application environments."

One of the benefits of working with a service provider like croit for data storage solutions is that it enables easier scalability. As Verges explains, "croit for Ceph provides one general-purpose storage platform for object, block, and file storage requirements for potentially hundreds of applications sharing the same cluster. This approach on Ceph enables extremely cost-effective scalability into the hundreds of petabytes per cluster on commodity hardware, either with hard drives or flash. Croit provides a GUI and an API allowing cluster installation in 5 minutes, and automated non-disruptive software upgrades for the operating system and storage in minutes. Furthermore, a croit cluster of 20PB can be managed by one person. That's unheard of with any other storage platform."

Thus, it is clear that managing data storage through software such as croit for Ceph is one of the most cost-effective, simple solutions available to businesses. "Our platform enables access to open-source economics with low-labor management and commercial support," Verges asserts.

Security for advanced data storage

However, as Verges notes, one of the essential facets for success in the implementation of a Ceph data storage solution is security. George Abou-Samra, Principal Consultant at ProServeIT, has experience working with clients to help them implement proper security measures for the use of open-source software, such as Ceph.

When it comes to open-source software, there are serious advantages and disadvantages in security. "Open-source software itself is not inherently insecure," explains Abou-Samra. "However, the main reason why some consider open-source software somewhat insecure is because their source code is available for anyone to inspect, which can be seen as both an advantage and a disadvantage."

According to Abou-Samra, while attackers can analyze code for vulnerabilities, transparency also opens the door for the community to review and identify security risks and flaws. "Some open-source projects have strong security features and are constantly reviewed and approved by a global community of developers," he adds. "Others might have limited resources to address security vulnerabilities in a timely manner, leaving everyone that uses that specific tool vulnerable and exposed."

As for what measures a company should take if they use these open-source solutions, Abou-Samra suggests they implement strict access protocols. "Follow the least privilege method for applying permissions to required resources," he explains. "If somebody doesn't need that level of privilege or admin access, what is the layer below that you can provide them without exposing other areas with that level of permission?"

Abrou-Samra also suggests businesses take basic measures to keep their data safe. These may include encrypting the data at both ends, keeping up to date with the latest security patches for the open-source software, and performing regular security testing, such as vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. He also recommends having a disaster recovery and incident response plan in place to help ensure your business can overcome any obstacles that may arise.

Applications of advanced data storage

These days, essentially every business is accumulating valuable data from their business processes, making an efficient and scalable data storage solution essential for their successful operation. In most companies, the amount of data is doubling every two or three years. The larger and more complex the business, the more data storage it will need. Businesses dealing with sensitive data must take extra precautions above and beyond the standard to ensure the security of their data in whatever storage system they choose.

Take e-commerce, for example. In the e-commerce world, success is all about forecasting trends and predicting which products will sell well and successfully. "The biggest issue we face is scouting trends properly and not being able to identify which products need to be replenished, and which ones were actually bad buys," explains Dawson Gant, Head of Store Partnerships at Ecom Authority, an Amazon management company that helps e-commerce businesses operating through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). "Having tons of data stored, we can now see real-time trends to make faster decisions, which helps us grow our client stores faster."

Sourcing Solutions International, a leading sustainable packaging company, is experiencing the profound impact of new data storage solutions. "The integration of advanced data storage solutions has already enhanced our ability to manage inventory, supply chain data, and customer information," explains Joseph A. Schlossberg, Vice President of Global Sales at SSI. "Data storage is only going to become more and more important as new retailers and brands decide to take advantage of the technology that inventory tools like RFID offer."

As data grows faster than storage budgets, businesses in virtually every industry will have to adopt more economical technologies for scalable data storage such as Ceph. Storage management solutions like croit for Ceph make it easier for businesses to adopt these new technologies to better manage their complexity and cost.