Nasuni Ensures Deleted Files in Cloud Storage Stay Deleted

When you store a file or any other type of data, you want to make sure it stays stored. Conversely, when you delete any type of data, you want to make sure it’s deleted.

Simple concepts they are, but they are not always simple to do — especially when it comes to cloud storage.

Secure deletion of files in the cloud is another matter; users do not have full control and cloud architecture works differently than standard on-premises IT systems. When files are uploaded to the cloud, for instance, there’s no need to back them up, because cloud services automatically replicate data in different locations.

That’s fine for reliability, but when it comes to permanently getting rid of files, this causes two problems — especially for regulated organizations, such as law firms and health care providers:

The conventional thought is that when a file is deleted in cloud storage, it’s gone for good, making accidental deletion by users a serious issue.

However, because a cloud service makes multiple copies of files and stores them in different locations, there’s no guarantee that a copy of the file doesn’t live somewhere out there in the cloud. And if the file contains sensitive information, liability could become a serious problem.

To solve this issue, Nasuni comes to the rescue. Nasuni Filer is a virtual NAS file server/front end that runs on VMware and uses publicly available cloud resources–namely, Amazon S3, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanex and Rackspace–to handle primary data cloud storage.

Nasuni on March 21 launched a new feature that permanently deletes files, but it occurs in a manner that’s safe from user error.

How does it work? Nasuni enables customers to set up a policy to delete snapshots based on the age of the snapshot or the number of snapshots in the cloud. When files are deleted, they will remain recoverable until the last snapshot that captured these files is retired. When the snapshots are retired, deleted files are truly gone.

Because Nasuni encrypts all data before uploading to the cloud, even if there were copies laying about somewhere in the cloud, they would be useless to anyone who did not possess the customer’s encryption key.

If you want to look closer at Nasuni, check out their Website.