Afore: CloudLink 2.0 with Secure Virtual Storage Appliance

AFORE Solutions, Inc., provider of cloud security and management solutions, announced the availability of their CloudLink 2.0 with Secure Virtual Storage Appliance (SVSA).

This release provides enhanced secure active storage capabilities in private, public and hybrid cloud environments. Operating at the virtualization layer, CloudLink Secure VSA offers flexible, multi-tenant storage encryption across any underlying storage technologies including iSCSI, FC, FCoE, NAS and DAS over varying cloud infrastructures.

Deployed in hosted virtual private clouds or public cloud infrastructures such as Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), VMware vCloud director environments or CA AppLogic based clouds, CloudLink Secure VSA secures the storage associated with hosted virtual machines with a layer of encryption required for compliance regulations such as HIPAA and PCI while affording protection against data remanence. This allows enterprises to take advantage of the scalability and cost effectiveness of a cloud environment without exposing mission-critical and security-sensitive applications and workloads to potential third-party vulnerabilities.

"As enterprises look to move mission critical and sensitive data in varying public and private cloud environments, they require secure storage solutions that meet security and regulatory requirements regardless of their cloud infrastructure," said Alex Berlin, CEO of AFORE Solutions. "CloudLink Secure VSA provides enterprises with a single foundation for efficiently and securely managing their data storage in the cloud while still receiving the performance and availability desired."

The CloudLink Secure VSA provides a secure SMB/CIFS or NFS storage repository accessible by virtual machines hosted in the cloud. In addition, enterprises can access multiple protected Secure VSAs from distributed locations across an integrated SSL encrypted path. Unlike storage gateway approaches which only encrypt data as it is placed into the cloud, the Secure VSA provides constant, active encryption of data associated with hosted virtual machines. Critical application data associated with databases, payment processing systems and healthcare applications, as well as backups and snapshot copies of the data, is protected at all times.

Each instance of the Secure VSA is managed by the enterprise and control of encryption keys is integrated with Active directory and key management systems, such as RSA DPM. Multiple appliances may be deployed and managed from a single management control point allowing unified control and protection of sensitive data across different cloud providers, geographic regions or between primary and DR locations.

CloudLink Secure VSA is a solution that enables cloud-based DR solutions to meet key regulatory and compliance requirements.

AFORE will be demonstrating their solutions at VMworld 2012, August 26 – 30, 2012, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.