PowerFlex and CloudLink: A Powerful Data Security Combination
Mon, 17 Aug 2020 21:41:08 -0000
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Security and operational efficiency continue to top IT executives’ datacenter needs lists. Dell Technologies looks at the complete solution to achieve both so customers can focus on their business outcomes.
Dell Technologies’ PowerFlex is a software-defined storage platform designed to significantly reduce operational and infrastructure complexity, empowering organizations to move faster by delivering flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale. PowerFlex provides a unified fabric of compute and storage with scale out flexibility for either of these ingredients to match workload requirements with full lifecycle simplification provided by PowerFlex Manager. Dell Technologies’ CloudLink, data encryption and key management solution, supports workload deployments from edge to core to cloud, providing a perfect complement to the PowerFlex family that enables flexible encryption tailored to the modern datacenter’s needs.
With increasing regulatory and compliance requirements, more and more customers now realize how critical encryption is to securing their data centers and need solutions that are built into their platforms. CloudLink, integrated with PowerFlex, provides reliable data encryption and key management in one solution with the flexibility to satisfy most customer's needs.
Built-in, not bolt on
CloudLink’s rich feature set integrates directly into the PowerFlex platform allowing our customers access to CloudLink's encryption and key management functionality, including data at rest and data in motion encryption, full key lifecycle management, and lightweight multi-tenancy support.
- Encryption for PowerFlex
CloudLink provides software-based data encryption and a full set of key management capabilities for PowerFlex, including:
- Policy-based key release to ensure data is only unlocked in a safe environment
- Machine grouping to ensure consistent policy configuration across drives
- Full key lifecycle management to maintain proper encryption key hygiene
- Key Management for Self-Encrypting Drives (SED)
SEDs offer high performant hardware-based Data-at-Rest Encryption ensuring that all data in the deployment is safe from prying eyes. On a PowerFlex platform, CloudLink can manage the keys for each individual drive and store them safely within our encrypted vault where customers can leverage CloudLink's full key lifecycle management feature set. This option, also integrated and deployable with PowerFlex Manager, is ideal for your sensitive data assets that require high-performance.
- Encryption for Machines
Sometimes Data-at-Rest Encryption is not enough, and our customers need to encrypt their virtual machines. CloudLink provides VM encryption by deploying agents on the guest OS. CloudLink's agent encryption gives our customers the ability to move encrypted VMs throughout their environment making tasks such as replication, deployment to production from QA, or out to satellite offices, safer and easier.
CloudLink’s encryption for machines agent can also encrypt data volumes on bare metal servers allowing customers to keep their data safe even when deployed on legacy hardware.
- Key Management over KMIP
When 3rd party encryptors need external key management, they turn to solutions that implement KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol). This open standard defines how encryptors and key managers communicate. CloudLink implements the KMIP protocol both as a client and a server to provide basic key storage and management for encryptors such as VMware’s native encryption features, or to plug-in to a customer’s existing keystore. These capabilities provide the flexibility required for today’s heterogenous environments.
Supporting the modern datacenter
There is a sea change occurring in data centers brought on by the relatively new technology of containers. 451 Research, a global research and advisory firm, released the results of its 2020 Voice of the Enterprise survey, which indicates that as companies consider the move to containerized deployments, security and compliance concerns are top of mind. However, for so many of the new container technology products from which to choose, proper security is not built-in.
Given the extreme mobility of containers, keeping customers’ data safe as applications move throughout a deployment – especially within the cloud – is a challenge. To address this gap, we introduced file volume encryption for Kubernetes container deployments in our CloudLink 7.0 release, which has been validated with PowerFlex 3.5. Our container encryption functionality is built on the same full lifecycle key management and agent-based encryption architectural model that we currently offer for PowerFlex. We deploy an agent within the container such that it sits directly on the data path. As the data is saved, we intercept it and make sure it is encrypted as it travels to and then comes to rest in the data store.
Data security doesn’t need to mean complex management
Hand in hand with PowerFlex, CloudLink provides data encryption and key management with unmatched flexibility, superior reliability, and simple and efficient operations complete with support from Dell as a complete solution. The PowerFlex Manager is a comprehensive IT operations and lifecycle management tool that drastically simplifies management and ongoing operation. CloudLink is integrated into this tool to make the deployment of the CloudLink agent a natural part the PowerFlex management framework.
Are you interested in PowerFlex and CloudLink? Please visit our websites for PowerFlex or CloudLink or reach out to your Dell Technologies sales representative for help.