Storage Made Easy: Transforming the Data Storage Industry with an Innovative Cybersecurity Solution for Files

The UK-based Software Company, Storage Made Easy provides a software solution called the Enterprise File Fabric that unifies file and object storage into a global file system for secure and accelerated collaboration. The company also offers enhanced cybersecurity against data challenges such as ransomware attacks, while accelerating end-user and system workflows using its file acceleration technology.

File Fabric's metadata is smart-indexed and forms the basis of the File Fabric being able to provide secure sharing and collaboration, content search and PHI/PII discovery, and intelligent policy-based enforcement of data for compliance legislature such as GDPR / CCPA / HIPAA.

M-Stream, a feature of the File Fabric, can accelerate massive files, and object data. FIPS-certified encryption ensures that assets are protected in-flight and at-rest. Smart indexing and data classifications, with cloud AI integrations ensure assets can be easily catalogued and found.

Improving Productivity by Reinforcing Data Infrastructure

The mission of Storage Made Easy is to provide intelligent policy-based enforcement and productivity enhancements across a company's entire data estate satisfying three major imperatives. It aims to satisfy a 'single pane of glass' entry point into corporate datasets; both file and object, for end-users and system workflows, 'joined-up' file governance, compliance, cybersecurity for corporate data assets wherever the data may be stored and focuses on B2B rather than the B2C market.

The initial challenge for Storage Made Easy was that the vision was too early. When the company first started, no one was talking about multi-cloud, data federation or focused on data compliance and cybersecurity challenges such as ransomware protection. So, the initial challenge was to stay the course and continue to build out the product until the market matured as it felt sure the problems of protecting a company's disparate data, whether on-cloud or on-premises was one that needed to be solved.

Gaining Recognition through Client Satisfaction

Storage Made Easy was recently listed as one of the 50 Companies to watch in 2020. The company influences the industry at a large scale, and that's its biggest achievement. Here are some of the notable feedback received from the clients:

"Storage Made Easy's File Fabric Software is an essential component of our IT infrastructure at Sema4. We appreciate the continued support from Storage Made Easy which has been particularly helpful over recent months as we've rapidly built out at COVID-19 testing solution,"­­- expresses Anatol Bliss, Senior Vice President of IT and Scientific Computing at Sema4.

"The File Fabric from Storage Made Easy enabled us to have web-scale remote access to our Nasuni SMB file shares, inclusive of Microsoft Teams support. This enables us to retire a secondary remote access file sharing solution we were using from Egnyte," -Todd Dughman, Director of Information Technology of TNP.

"The final catalyst that justified the company moving forward with SME was the quality of support. It has been great; they respond very quickly. Overall, File Fabric has been terrific for our business. Not only did it provide everything we needed, but we realized we could do things we would love to have done but didn't imagine we could do,"- Jacob Moss, Music Tech Assistant at Sparks & Shadows.

"The File Fabric has streamlined processing for our users and me while providing options we never had before," – Yungchen Wang, system administrator of ITRI.

An Experienced Market Leader

Jim Liddle is the CEO of Storage Made Easy. Prior to this, Jim was the European Sales and Operations Director for GigaSpaces. He joined GigaSpaces in 2006 to help expand its European operations. Before GigaSpaces, Jim was the European General Manager for Versata, a NASDAQ listed business process and rules management company. During his 6-year tenure at Versata, Jim also worked in technical, product management, and product marketing roles.

Jim has extensive experience in sales, big data, middleware and cloud technologies and has a track record of successfully growing sales for high growth technology companies over the last 20 years.

Before Storage Made Easy launching its first product, Jim and his Co-founder, Ian Osborne bootstrapped the company for three years with a small team coding and building out the product that would go on to become The Enterprise File Fabric.

Solving Industry Challanges with Innovative Solutions

Storage Made Easy was selected to be one of the CyberSecurity innovators of LORCA's third cohort. LORCA is one of two cyber innovation centres as part of the National Cyber Security Strategy objective to grow the UK's cybersecurity sector and make sure the UK is the safest place to live and do business online.

Security by Design was selected as one of the most pressing challenges. The office is now on the lookout for cybersecurity solutions that make it significantly cheaper or easier for products to be made secure. It includes ensuring products are safe as par standard, rather than requiring an add-on solution, and at a code level, as this remains a challenge across the sector.

Making Data Accessible and Secure

The File Fabric provides cybersecurity for a company's most important asset, which is data. It unifies, secures and accelerates data through the use of 'smart indexing', making data more accessible, discoverable and productive.

It provides a single unified entry point to corporate data, providing access to over 60 files and object storage solutions, including Windows Filers, SAN, NAS, Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud. Legacy and new data repositories can be accessed and controlled from Common Secure Sharing Policies across siloed data, Unified Identity Access Management / Access Control, End-to-End Policy Driven Data Compliance, Unified Encryption (FIPS), Single Pane of Glass Discovery and Search, Single Pane of Glass access and management, and Real-Time Ransomware Protection.

Collaborating with Customers for Product Innovation

As Storage Made Easy is a tech company, it is in the DNA of the founders and the people who have been brought into the company. It is also essential to have the right systems and processes in place. The company has some formalization in the methods used that founders and employees have brought with them from other past experiences such as the stage-gate process and the utilization of a Kanban/Scrum model for agile development.

Significant partnerships with customers also help drive product innovation. Jim says that as a start-up as if it's longevity increases, and it starts to accumulate customers, the demands on the product set from individual customers and customer councils help to aid in the drive of product innovation.

Overcoming Challenges in Data Storage

Digital data is exploding, and it is being stored further from the corporate perimeter than it ever has before and across more siloed services than ever before. Jim believes that companies don't appear to be committing to a single cloud vendor and cheap on-premises object storage coupled with compliance regimes as fear of data breaches means organizations are adopting a hybrid approach to data storage.

It presents challenges for companies, particularly in regards to how they corral this rapidly growing distributed dataset, and how they secure it, ensuring it is available, usable and productive for their employees and their business.

Leading Cybersecurity Market through Disruptive Technologies

Jim believes that new technology innovations such as AI, deep learning will have a great impact on the cybersecurity market. These will also be used to predict and protect companies from known and potentially unknown cyberattacks in real-time.

It brings Storage Made Easy neatly back to the File Fabric and its File and Object 'smart indexing' technology. As the File Fabric mines a company's file metadata, it is available to be used for the good of the organization in all sorts of ways which does not necessarily involve full-blown AI or deep learning. It may encompass using metadata to be smart about creating an Active Archive across two or more storage instances, aiding in the recovery of ransomware attacks.

Internally, the company thinks of these as 'smart correlations' and believes that harnessing these can put much power in the hands of companies with regards to how they corral their data from compliance protect it in addition to how they can protect their data.

As Storage Made Easy moves forward, deep learning algorithms are introducing the possibility of being even smarter about finding patterns in the metadata that the File Fabric stores and additionally the end-user events that the File Fabric observes. Ultimately this will be an enabler for a smarter, more secure, document-driven enterprise.