CAMPBELL, CA--(Marketwire - Mar 12, 2013) - Panzura, a leading provider of global cloud storage solutions, today announced that the US Department of Commerce (DOC) National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has certified that the award-winning Panzura Global Cloud Storage System is the first cloud-integrated storage platform to achieve Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation. FIPS was established by NIST in response to the 2004 Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 to help secure intra-government communication using common and robust identification verification. Panzura is also compliant with the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) for information technology products. Panzura's leading security compliance achievements were key considerations in its selection by DOC as its cloud storage platform for backup and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) as the core technology to consolidate storage across 265 of its sites.
Panzura also added FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated Hardware Security Module (HSM) to provide high performance crypto acceleration. The encryption keys are never exposed providing logical and physical protection from non-authorized access including potential hardware tampering attempts.
In 2009, the Obama administration announced a new government cloud computing initiative designed to cut infrastructure costs and enhance the greenness of government computing. A key part of this initiative is to move data off expensive local storage and into the cloud. Until now, data security concerns have tempered federal agency enthusiasm for cloud storage. Panzura's new certification brings both seamless integration with cloud storage and robust security features to all branches of US government.
"FIPS validation is quite difficult to achieve but is increasingly required by Federal agencies and contractors," said Robert R. Moore, Senior Vice President of Storage Solutions, Carahsoft. "As Panzura's public sector partner, we congratulate the company on this achievement and look forward to leveraging this certification to drive even broader Federal adoption of Panzura's Global Cloud Storage System."
"Panzura's completion of FIPS 140-2 validation represents a significant milestone in the development of cloud storage for Federal agencies and contractors," said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director at IDC. "As the first cloud-integrated storage platform to meet this requirement, Panzura has broken through a major barrier to gain widespread cloud adoption by security conscious organizations."
The Panzura Global Cloud Storage System provides a secure, robust platform to Federal agencies for cloud-integrated NAS, capacity centralization, multi-directional data exchange, archiving, backup, and disaster recovery with complete IT control. Dubbed "NetApp in the Sky" by analysts, Panzura brings all of the features and performance of local NAS for Federal data plus the cost and scalability benefits of cloud storage without requiring any changes to existing infrastructures, all while meeting Federal security standards. Panzura partners with all major cloud storage providers, including Amazon, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, and Nirvanix.
In addition to validating Panzura for FIPS 140-2, the DOC's NIST also selected Panzura as a means to move data from onsite capacity to the cloud. The objective of this effort was to eliminate some of NIST's dependency on traditional storage media, improve NIST's disaster recovery readiness and reduce NIST's storage cost. Among the key requirements for solutions considered for this initiative was provision of advanced security features for preventing unauthorized access.
"Completing FIPS certification brings the power of the Panzura solution to a broad swath of Federal agencies and other organizations that require it," said Randy Chou, CEO and co-founder of Panzura. "Panzura certification makes cloud storage, a key efficiency mandate for the Federal government, a viable, non-disruptive option for Federal IT operations."
Panzura Security
The Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) validates cryptographic modules to FIPS 140-2 and other cryptography-based standards. The CMVP is a joint effort between NIST and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of the Government of Canada. Solutions, like Panzura, validated as conforming to FIPS 140-2 are accepted by the Federal agencies of both countries for the protection of sensitive information (United States) or Designated Information (Canada). The goal of the CMVP is to provide Federal agencies with a rigorous security metric to use in procuring equipment containing validated technology.
The purpose of the USGCB initiative is to create security configuration baselines for Information Technology products, such as Panzura, widely deployed across federal agencies. Panzura technology accommodates the rigorous baseline recommendations of USGCB, enabling government agencies to maintain compliance while leveraging the benefits of cloud storage.
Panzura's military-grade AES-256-CBC encryption for data in motion and at rest ensures one of the highest levels of data security for data stored in the cloud. Transmission security is further enhanced by application of transport layer security (TLS) for data sent to and from the cloud.
About Panzura
Panzura optimizes enterprise data storage management and distribution in the cloud, making cloud storage simple and secure. Panzura's revolutionary global cloud storage solution seamlessly combines the flexibility, performance and productivity benefits of distributed storage with the manageability, security and cost benefits of centralized storage, overcoming fundamental "administrator vs. user" and "budget vs. performance" conflicts. With Panzura, data location no longer affects usage. Panzura: Cloud Storage Made Seamless. For more information, visit www.panzura.com or email info@panzura.com.
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