CIO Review – Superna: Closing the Gap between Data and Security

While most companies today find themselves in the midst of the greatest platform shift in technology history, the file and object data (a.k.a. unstructured data) at the core of these businesses continues to be the most complex to manage, protect and monetize. As a result, thousands of organizations find themselves anchored to legacy systems and processes, making it difficult to embrace modern data platforms and execute next generation data strategies while ensuring security and auditability at every step of the journey.

Enter Superna.

For over a decade, Superna has empowered companies by providing enterprise-class data solutions for managing, auditing and securing unstructured data across the multi-cloud. It offers a scalable, secure, and easy-to-orchestrate platform for what are typically multi-petabyte, complex file and object data environments. With over 3,000 customers, Superna has become an industry leader in the space touting a strategic partnership with Dell as they co-deliver one of the most secure file and object storage solutions for the multi-cloud. And, most recently, Superna launched capabilities across AWS, Azure and GCP to better serve its customers and their multi-cloud initiatives.

Superna’s patented technology reduces the complexity of managing unstructured data by making data availability, analysis security, auditing and backup/archive easier. As 80% of all digital data globally is unstructured, this reduction of complexity across such a massive data sprawl is opening new opportunities for data cost reduction, resiliency and even monetization. In fact, while file and object platforms were traditionally only used to store and protect items like financial records, medical information, big data analytics and intellectual property, the Superna team is now seeing a tectonic shift in usage and development trends. “For years, platforms like object storage were seen as dumping grounds for data that would just sit and grow stale. With the cost-to-performance enhancements made in some of these platforms recently, we’re now seeing object storage as not only a target for static backups or archives, but also as a primary storage target for re-factored or newly developed applications,” says Alex Hesterberg, CEO of Superna. “We’ve also witnessed an incredibly amount of innovation in 3rd party analytics solutions and cloud native services that can more easily process and monetize unstructured data if you can get it to where it needs to be.”

Nowadays, with increased growth and usage comes the risk of such data being ransomed or exfiltrated. This is where Superna has led the industry in closing the Data-To-Security gap. Unlike other data platforms, Superna can automatically detect the threats that lead to data loss: ransomware strains, exfiltration, mass delete activity and untrusted data access. What makes Superna even more unique is that its software can move data under threat into Air Gap environments and even lock-out users who have engaged in nefarious behavior at the data access layer itself.

This year, Superna delighted its customers even further by extending its core data protection and security offerings to multicloud unstructured data platforms. Superna’s Engineering team took the steps to containerize the solution years ago, allowing it to be deployed on-premise and simplifying the transition to cloud-native environments. Customers can now confidently take advantage of cloud archive tiers for cost reduction, cloud analytics for data monetization and cloud backup for multi-cloud resiliency.

What’s more, Superna has maintained the same user interface, so there is less of a learning curve for customers to manage their data on new platforms. “We are hyper-focused on creating a powerful, but seamless experience for our customers managing their data across on-premise and cloud infrastructure,” shared Andrew MacKay, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Superna, “Data’s management and security should be the same regardless of where the data lives. This is why we are building multi-cloud tools from the ground up.” Recently, Superna started working with AWS when one of its clients, a healthcare company with an on-premise private cloud data center, requested to migrate and protect some of its unstructured data and workloads to their AWS environment. As a HIPAA-compliant healthcare company, the client needed Superna’s audit, Data Loss Prevention and Ransomware capabilities it utilized on-premise to have parity within their AWS estate. This drove Superna to accelerate its public cloud presence to help customers across all verticals.

“For years now, Superna has been providing next generation data security, orchestration ad resiliency software for the largest, most complex datasets on earth”

It can’t be overstated how significantly different the Superna approach is to data security than to traditional approaches. “Prevention is the new recovery,” states Hesterberg, “with data security attacks now occurring hundreds of times a day and averaging seven-figure recovery costs per incident, trying to restore services from multiple copies of potentially compromised data is not an option.” Superna can detect threat patterns associated with ransomware strains and nefarious user behavior, thereby recognizing attacks as they are taking place and logging the recovery plan during the attack. “We believe data recovery requires a precision approach versus brute force methodology,” says MacKay.

With increased data sprawl and platform adoption comes increased data regulation centered on security and privacy. Superna’s ability to provide data forensics enables its customers to adhere to compliance safeguards and controls by efficiently auditing where data sits and which users access it. As a result, Superna creates a diagnostic audit trail that addresses some of the data controls in not only HIPAA regulation, but also GDPR, PCI, CCPA and LGPD.

Superna has successfully positioned itself to bridge the gap between a more aggressive security risk landscape and an increasingly distributed production data footprint. While providing the actual security layer around the data, the company has become the first and last line of defense around data.

Originally Published on CIOReview, April 25, 2023