CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

Are you worried about employees sending sensitive data like private health information (PHI), financial records or business trade secrets through third party websites? Are you worried about your data getting lost, stolen or hijacked by ransomware when employees use popular file sync and share services in the cloud? In this article, we’ll discuss how CentreStack addresses all these issues while increasing worker productivity! And we think you’re going to love taking control by using it to implement secure file sharing in your own datacenter. With CentreStack, secure file sharing is easier than sending an email: 1. Users simply access the file or folder through their mapped drive or mobile device, 2. Right click on the file or folder they’d like to share, 3. And then enter the email address of the recipient. This process makes the file available without transferring it to any third-party clouds or servers and allows you to set your own security policies. For example, an administrator c...

Segmentation of File Share Data Locations Despite the massive cloud migration movement, most data still live on local file shares. In a recent report, IDG states that only 33% of secure file sharing and storage data has been migrated to the cloud. Most interestingly, the surveyed organizations collectively plan to migrate another 39% of that data in the next 3 years but have no plans to migrate the remaining 28% of their data . They go on to quote similar statistics for other data types but the conclusions are the same, data will be split between cloud and on-premise locations for the foreseeable future. There are a variety of reasons for this segmentation. For example, productivity and profit may drive some file shares toward cloud services, while others remain on-premise because of concerns with security, control and trust. This means that increasing bandwidth will not be enough to guarantee total cloud adoption. Tradeoffs Between Cloud and Local File Shares As a result, there are th...

Enterprise IT professionals continue to face file server migration challenges primarily driven by a fundamental lack of support for security and control. It isn’t that cloud storage services are oblivious to these concerns. On the contrary, many have implemented their own mechanisms to secure data. But are enterprises willing to accept these new models – even in the face of accelerating cloud migration pressure? Can they become comfortable entrusting critical, corporate data to faceless third parties? Can they afford to redesign and re-implement existing security practices and administrative procedures? Unfortunately, the answers seem to lean towards the negative. When faced with the costs of upgrading existing infrastructure or increasing workforce productivity needs, business executives may explore cloud adoption as a modern reflex. But, since they typically operate in a Windows environment, using Active Directory for authentication to Windows file servers with NTFS based access cont...

The CentreStack platform has recently been enhanced to provide better security with endpoint encryption. CentreStack also provides data-at-rest encryption, but that addresses a different threat model. Let’s review both threat models and explore the advantages in security and performance that come from CentreStack’s unique approach to endpoint encryption.   Threat Models for Endpoint Encryption and Data-at-Rest encryption CentreStack provides access to cloud storage through a mapped drive on your client machine. In order to do so efficiently, we present a directory listing of all content but nothing is downloaded until it is actually used. And once it is downloaded, the data is stored in a local cache on the disk. This approach is great for performance because it minimizes bandwidth usage and avoids overloading the device’s storage system by syncing everything down when most of it will never be used. But what happens if the device is lost or stolen? In that case, even though the th...

CentreStack is different from other file sync and share solutions by focusing on security and centralized management. There are many security features already, such as leveraging NTFS permission, using drive based access model and etc. As a recent feature, now there is a group policy item that controls client side encryption.  This feature is very unique to drive based access model. As you may be aware, there are two methods when it comes to file sync and share. One method is that there is  a local folder that is 100% sync to cloud. The other is that there is a virtual drive letter that is sync to cloud. The first is folder based, and the second is drive based. In the folder based model, the local folder is basically controlled by the local operating system and there is not much you can do besides the BitLocker or some third party app like TrueCrypt. However, in the dive based model, since the access is going through the file system driver layer, the drive can be encrypt t...