Navigating the Skies of Advanced Storage Security: Key Storage Protocols and Standards Aerospace Companies Should Be Aware Of

In the dynamic realm of advanced aerospace and engineering technology, safeguarding sensitive data is paramount. Whether designing cutting-edge aircraft or developing revolutionary space exploration technologies, robust advanced storage security protocols are critical. In this guide, we'll explore the importance of choosing storage solutions that meet stringent security standards for aerospace and advanced engineering companies. Additionally, we'll delve into key storage protocols and top technology providers meeting these standards.

The Importance of Stringent Advanced Storage Security Standards for Aerospace and Advanced Engineering Companies

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Aerospace and advanced engineering companies operate in highly competitive and regulated environments, where innovation and intellectual property are prized assets. Here's why choosing a storage solution that meets stringent security standards is crucial:

  1. Protection of Intellectual Property: Aerospace and advanced engineering companies invest significant resources in research and development to drive innovation. Intellectual property, including proprietary designs, patents, and trade secrets, must be safeguarded against theft, espionage, or unauthorised access. Choosing a storage solution with robust encryption and access controls ensures that sensitive intellectual property remains confidential and secure.
  2. Regulatory Compliance: Aerospace and advanced engineering industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements, especially when dealing with government contracts or international partnerships. Compliance with industry standards such as FIPS 140-2 and NIST SP 800-171 is essential to meet regulatory obligations and maintain the trust of customers and stakeholders. Selecting a storage solution that adheres to these standards demonstrates a commitment to security and regulatory compliance.
  3. Mitigation of Cyber Threats: The aerospace and advanced engineering sectors are prime targets for cyberattacks due to the high value of their intellectual property and the potential impact of security breaches. Cyber threats, including ransomware, data breaches, and industrial espionage, pose significant risks to companies' operations, reputation, and financial stability. By deploying storage solutions with advanced security features such as encryption, intrusion detection, and threat monitoring, companies can mitigate the risk of cyber threats and protect their critical assets.
  4. Preservation of Data Integrity: Data integrity is paramount in aerospace and advanced engineering applications, where accuracy and reliability are essential. Storage solutions that ensure data integrity through mechanisms such as cryptographic checksums and data validation safeguards against unauthorised modifications or tampering. Maintaining data integrity is critical for engineering simulations, testing, and analysis, where the accuracy of results directly impacts product performance and safety.
  5. Business Continuity and Resilience: Aerospace and advanced engineering companies rely heavily on data for decision-making, project management, and collaboration. Any disruption to data availability or loss of critical information can have severe consequences for project timelines, productivity, and profitability. Choosing storage solutions with built-in redundancy, disaster recovery capabilities, and data replication ensures business continuity and resilience, even in the face of unforeseen events such as hardware failures, natural disasters, or cyber incidents.
  6. Safeguarding Mission-Critical Operations: Imagine the stakes of a satellite launch or a critical flight operation. Protecting advanced storage ensures that mission-critical operations run without interruption. For example, backing up and protecting sensitive flight data is essential for maintaining safety and operational efficiency in the aerospace industry.

Understanding Key Storage Protocols and Standards

Now, let's delve into the key advanced storage security protocols and standards that aerospace and advanced engineering companies should consider:

  1. AES (Advanced Encryption Standard): AES is a benchmark in encryption, offering robust protection. Aerospace and advanced engineering companies can employ AES to encrypt data stored in various mediums, ensuring security against brute-force attacks.
  2. TLS (Transport Layer Security): TLS secures communication channels, mitigating risks of interception and tampering. Implementing TLS is crucial for aerospace and advanced engineering companies transmitting data across networks.
  3. FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standards): FIPS 140-2 ensures cryptographic modules meet stringent security standards. Aerospace and advanced engineering companies must adhere to FIPS 140-2-certified solutions for cryptographic operations, safeguarding classified data.
  4. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure): PKI facilitates secure authentication and data exchange, enhancing access control and data protection across aerospace and engineering infrastructure.
  5. NIST SP 800-171: Compliance with NIST SP 800-171 is essential for aerospace and advanced engineering companies handling controlled unclassified information (CUI), ensuring data confidentiality and integrity.
  6. Blockchain Technology: Blockchain provides decentralised data storage and verification, suitable for aerospace and engineering applications requiring immutable records and enhanced data integrity.
  7. FIPS 197 (Advanced Encryption Standard - Rijndael): FIPS 197 defines the AES algorithm, ensuring interoperability and standardised cryptographic techniques for enhanced security.

Top Technology Storage Providers Meeting Advanced Security Standards

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With an understanding of the importance of stringent security standards and key storage protocols, aerospace and advanced engineering companies can now explore top technology providers offering solutions that meet these standards. Let's delve into some reputable providers:

  1. IBM: IBM's Spectrum Storage suite offers encryption capabilities and robust access controls, meeting FIPS 140-2 compliance requirements.
  2. IXSystems: IXSystems, renowned for its TrueNAS storage solutions, provides secure storage tailored for aerospace and advanced engineering needs. TrueNAS meets stringent security standards, including FIPS 140-2 compliance, ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance for critical engineering projects.
  3. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE): HPE's Nimble Storage platform delivers high performance and data protection features, including FIPS 140-2 validated encryption, ensuring security for aerospace and advanced engineering data.
  4. NetApp: NetApp's storage solutions offer encryption at rest and in transit, meeting advanced security needs. Their ONTAP software supports FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption for effective data protection.

By partnering with these reputable technology storage providers, aerospace and advanced engineering companies can access cutting-edge solutions that meet advanced security standards, ensuring the protection, integrity, and availability of their critical data assets. In an era of rapid technological advancement and evolving cyber threats, investing in robust storage security is not just a choice but a strategic imperative for success and resilience in aerospace and advanced engineering industries.

What is FreeNAS, ZFS and TrueNAS?

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Since 2020, FreeNAS has been known as TrueNAS Core, and is available for download from the TrueNAS website. There are several key differences between the renamed TrueNAS product solutions to be aware of:

FreeNAS users often tell us about their love of TrueNAS. Here's an overview of why ZFS makes them both awesome.

FreeNAS is the world’s number 1 storage OS with over 10+ Million Downloads, it includes Enterprise-Grade Features is built on Open Source (OpenZFS) and is BSD licensed.

ZFS is an enterprise-ready open source file system, RAID controller, and volume manager with unprecedented flexibility and an uncompromising commitment to data integrity. It eliminates most, if not all of the shortcomings found in legacy file systems and hardware RAID devices. Once you go ZFS, you will never go back.

TrueNAS systems are fully supported, based on the same open source technology which makes FreeNAS so great and offer a unmatchable level of availability by utilising Dual Controllers, ZFS, rigorous build processes and much more.

Why TrueNAS & ZFS?

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Copy-on-Write

​ZFS keeps your data safe. Utilising Copy-on-Write technology, ZFS does not change the location of data until a write is completed and verified. This ensures that your data isn’t lost during a interrupted task such as a power outage.

ZFS uses a 256-bit hash of the data in a file system block, known as a checksum. This checksum ensures data integrity during writes. The way it handles and tests writes means that each write is tested, eliminating storage degradation such as bitrot. It also eliminates the write hole which allows for silent data corruption within RAID.

RAID

Striped VDEV’s, Mirrored VDEV’s and Striped Mirrored VDEV’s are essentially the same as RAID0, RAID1 and RAID10 accordingly with one difference; automatic check summing prevents silent data corruption that is otherwise usually undetectable by most hardware RAID cards.

RAIDZ is the very similar to RAID5 but without the wrote hole penalty that is often encountered with RAID5. RAIDZ2 is the same as RAIDZ but with double parity to tolerate multiple disk failures (RAID6) and RAIDZ3 allows for a third parity point to allow for three drive failures.

Scalable

​ZFS can handle enormous data pools of up to 1.84 x 10^19 times more data than other 64bit systems such as BTRFS as it uses a 128-bit file system. It’s designed to allow for capacity that far outreaches that which would be used in the real world to ensure you don’t have to be concerned with scalability.

Intelligent

​ZFS sends writes to individual physical disks rather than just a RAID volume. This allows for stripe writes across RAID volumes and can perform synchronous writes to speed up performance. This model also ensure there are no long waits for file system checks.

ZFS incorporates algorithms to make sure your Most Recently Used (MRU) and Most Frequently Used (MSU) data are stored in your fastest system storage media. Utilizing MRU & MSU combined with flash/NVDIMM ZILs/SLOGs and ARC/L2ARC devices, you can speed up your performance astronomically.

Conclusion

​ZFS is a scalable, mature and incredibly secure file system that is built to last. It has many intelligent features and as it’s based on open source it has many different granular tweaks and functions that are available due to many individuals and organisations contributing to the development and testing of it. While ZFS can seem complex, the TrueNAS UI helps to simplify that to ensure that your experience with the platform is straightforward and seamless

We've deployed TrueNAS into many sectors, each customer having a wildly different but complex business case. Seeing TrueNAS in action, as well as organising proof of concepts has been instrumental in demonstrating the outstanding performance of these solutions. If you'd like to know more, contact us.

Haptic Networks launch TrueNAS website

Of all the technology we work with, we've been more excited about TrueNAS than a large number of alternatives. We've partnered with iXsystems for over 2 years and are huge advocates for both FreeNAS and TrueNAS platforms.

TrueNAS has been instrumental in many of our storage solutions for the past few years. Today we've launched our latest technology micro site dedicated solely to TrueNAS.

For over twenty years, iXsystems has been the go-to company for storage and servers driven by Open Source, and they're also the developers of FreeNAS®. With unique convergence of hardware, software, and storage expertise, we bring you the award-winning TrueNAS flash-turbocharged enterprise-grade open storage platform, offering reliability and performance at a value unheard of in storage.

TrueNAS unifies storage access, grows to nearly 10PB in a rack, is available in hybrid and all-flash configurations, has features that let you move away from the cloud saving over 70% over AWS, and uses the ZFS file system to guarantee data stays pristine and safe.

If you would like to know more about TrueNAS or FreeNAS just ask, we have product demonstrations, in house storage and networking consultants as well as demonstration equipment for you to trial the solution.

read more about this incredible solution by clicking here

iXsystems TrueNAS is certified with Veeam Backup

You all know TrueNAS is amazing. We recently announced our partnership with Storage & Server heavyweight iXsystems, in the majority of our communications we were incredibly enthusiastic about the solutions and the company as a whole. It turns out that it wasn't just us, the latest news is that iXsystems have officially passed the Veeam Backup and Replication v9.5 for VMware certification tests for the TrueNAS Z-product line enterprise storage systems.

The complete certification includes the Z20, Z30, Z35 Hybrid Storage and the Z50 All-Flash Arrays, all running TrueNAS 9.10

As UK Preferred Partners of iXsystems, as well as long-standing Veeam Partners - we have experience with every detail of TrueNAS solution implementation, including planning, custom application and driver development, hardware qualification, hardware integration, testing, and deployment. Focus your energy on your core competencies - let us help you with the rest. Do you need storage for virtual machines? Servers for thousands of users? Computing power for advanced scientific software? If so TrueNAS could be the right fit for you.

You can read more about TrueNAS on our dedicated microsite by clicking here

Click here to ask us how you can join us on a webinar or web demo to find out more about this range of solutions.