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Calamu Technologies has raised $2.4 million for its approach to securing data in a safe harbor spanning three separate platforms, using a data fragmentation platform to make it difficult for cybercriminals to reconstitute stolen data.
All three locations where Calamu Protect stores data would have to be compromised before a cybercriminal could bring those pieces back together. That same data, however, is still always immediately accessible by its rightful owners, said Calamu Technologies CEO Paul Lewis. “The safe data harbor spans multiple public clouds,” he said.
Calamu Protect also constantly monitors the integrity of the data. If it detects an anomaly, Calamu Protect will automatically thwart a ransomware attack while its built-in redundancy capability ensures data remains accessible, Lewis said.
The company has implemented data compression utilities to reduce the total cost of storage. Lewis noted that Calamu Protect also enables organizations to store data in a way that is difficult to subpoena because the data fragments are stored in multiple cloud platforms spanning geographies that are subject to different judicial systems. Calamu Protect has already been certified to be compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms.
In addition to providing a graphical user interface, the company also provides an application programming interface (API) through which applications can be integrated natively with Calamu Protect, noted Lewis.
In effect, Calamu Protect enables organizations to meet data security and privacy mandates such as the General Data Protection Rule required by the European Union via a single platform, said Lewis.
Fragmenting data to protect it
Data fragmentation is not a new concept, but Lewis said Calamu Technologies is applying it in a way that is simpler to implement across a distributed computing environment. Rather than just allowing an organization to access a pristine copy of their data in the wake of a ransomware attack, Lewis said the goal should be to make it difficult to compromise that data in the first place.
Melding data protection and security workflows has long been a goal of enterprise IT organizations, but it has been difficult to achieve. Organizations can limit their exposure to a ransomware attack by regularly backing up data, but there’s always a risk that data might become encrypted in a way that prevents an organization from being able to access it. In theory, every time a ransomware attack is detected, data backup should be automatically triggered. The challenge is that data may already be infected with malware, which would mean that once a file is backed up, the malware could encrypt all the data that an organization was planning to use to recover from the attack.
Calamu Technologies is making a case for a fragmented approach to storing data that frustrates the ability of cybercriminals to share stolen data in a meaningful way; as a byproduct, it also addresses data privacy requirements, Lewis said. Of course, it’s still possible the credentials of an end user of Calamu Protect might be compromised by, for example, a phishing attack. However, the potential impact is sharply reduced if that attack can’t encrypt the data for ransom.
It’s not clear to what degree enterprise IT organizations may be willing to revisit how they store data. The challenge is it can take some organizations years to appreciate a new “art of the possible” because they’ve been performing a task the same way for so long that it’s often too difficult to consider any alternative. However, the need to reimagine those processes is now acute, as a ransomware scourge continues to cripple organizations large and small. As organizations become more accustomed to employing multiple clouds, it creates an opportunity to rethink how data is stored, managed, and secured.
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