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Cyberstorage: Stopping Ransomware at the Heart of the Enterprise
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About this session
Eric Bednash, CEO of RackTop Systems, introduces cyberstorage, a Gartner-defined category, as a data-centric answer to ransomware and insider threat. He argues the security and storage markets were both born in the 1990s and never converged: perimeter tooling (firewalls, IDS/IPS, endpoint, MFA, MDR) solves 'doors and windows' problems, while file and object storage optimises for utility and knows nothing about user behaviour, leaving 80 to 90 percent of digital assets on 'dumb' systems he calls a hacker's paradise. Only about three percent of security spending goes to data security, he notes, and backup vendors have hijacked the ransomware conversation despite slow, incomplete restores. Using an ER-style hospital analogy, he contrasts a 1994 'blind trust' storage system with one that evaluates user behaviour, device, schedule and access patterns on every request, blocks a single user rather than the whole share, and maps to all five NIST CSF functions. A recorded demo of RackTop's BrickStor platform shows ransomware blocked and remediated in real time. He closes with two takeaways: shift from outside-in to inside-out, and build security into storage by design.
The bad guys don't steal the network - they steal the data - and for nearly the last three decades organizations have been accumulating petabytes of data on unprotected and unsecured storage systems. Cyberstorage, a new market category defined by Gartner, defines the criteria for modernizing 90s unstructured storage technology to defend against modern threats. This talk introduces the concepts of Cyberstorage, and how a team of ex-NSA cyber dudes took a new perspective to solving one of the most complicated data security problems.
Key takeaways
- Inventory where unstructured data actually lives; 80 to 90 percent of digital assets sit on file and object stores that have only access control, encryption and superficial audit.
- Treat backups as recovery, not ransomware protection: active detection and blocking at the data plane must come before restore-based remediation.
- Look for storage that evaluates every request against user behaviour, device, schedule and normal access volume, and can block one user or host without taking the share offline.
- Map data-layer controls to all five NIST CSF functions (identify, protect, detect, respond, recover) so hygiene, active defence and recovery work as one system.
- Feed storage-level audit and incidents into the SIEM, SOAR and SOC so the data plane stops being a blind spot in the zero-trust picture.
Speakers
Eric Bednash
Eric Bednash is a founder and Chief Executive Officer of RackTop Systems, an innovative data security company who pioneered the fusion of active threat defense and detection into a unified file storage platform, an emerging market known today as… Read moreRead less
Eric Bednash is a founder and Chief Executive Officer of RackTop Systems, an innovative data security company who pioneered the fusion of active threat defense and detection into a unified file storage platform, an emerging market known today as Cyberstorage. A passion-driven entrepreneur and innovator, Bednash brings to his position more than 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity sector, where he designed specialized data security products for the U.S. Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, and commercial enterprises. Bednash co-founded RackTop in 2010 with a simple vision – to enable any organization to protect their data as if it were a national secret. Through his leadership and inventions, he has led the creation of a platform to arm companies with a simplified solution to the most complex Enterprise data protection challenges. RackTop’s technology has been leveraged by numerous organizations spanning a wide variety of global industries – notably in government, energy, financial services, healthcare, higher education, media/advertising, and entertainment. Prior to 2010, Bednash served as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ross Technologies, a mid-sized consulting firm in the Government IT services space focused on developing mission data systems for the U.S. government and held numerous technical leadership roles as a contractor within the National Security industry. He started his professional career specializing in data center systems for Time-Warner Corporation and spent the better part of the dot-com boom in Washington, D.C., where he consulted businesses on the new and expanding internet era. Bednash is a Forbes Technology Council member and a contributing writer for VentureBeat, among other publications, and an Advisory Board Member of Mission Link Next, an exclusive organization focused on accelerating innovation and advancing solutions to solve national security threats. He attended Rochester Institute of Technology, Penn State University and Stevenson University, completing both undergraduate and graduate coursework in Business and Technology Management. He resides in Fulton, Maryland with his family, and is an avid musician and wine collector.
