AnalysisStartup DataGravitylaid off staff in February last year and subsequently pivoted away from building and selling its Discovery Series array line to building a shipping virtual appliance using its Discovery Series array software as a basis.
DataGravity for Virtualisation (DGfV) runs as a virtual machine and operates in vSphere and VSAN environments. It's pointed at VMs and also at policies that users can set and then monitors access to the data files used by those VMs against the policies. There are more than 600 file types that DGfV can access and it carries out full text keyword indexing. It will identify potentially sensitive data, such as credit card numbers and IP data and be alert to its access and use.
Policies can define how files should be accessed and by who. DGfV can provide dashboard reports on the state of a customer's file estate, run compliance checks and identify dormant data. It can be used to review data access audit trails and identify anomalous data.
The SW can be set to run a snapshot when anomalous user access data is detected. DGfV can also tell you who modified what data and when. DataGravity says that, with this, data can be recovered after malicious or accidental deletion or ransomware encoding.
Its DGfV product can also find malware with already-identified fingerprints.
The idea is that DGfV fills a gap between traditional data protection (backup) and security products, and does so partly because it "knows" the content of a VM's files and can react by triggering snapshots when ransomware or other anomalous access behaviour is detected. DFvG is a better class of dynamic and reactive security monitoring software.
DataGravity co-founder and CEO Paula Long has blogged about DGfV, and asserts that "there are zero products focused on securing and protecting data in a virtualised environment... Basically, there was a huge gap. To protect and recover data, you need to understand security and data together."
It’s an obvious extension of its tech to add support for Hyper-V and then KVM, and also to run as a cloud instance and protect a user's virtual machine data in the public clouds. If it can get sufficient traction with DGfV then it has this obvious roadmap ahead of it.
Read a product brochure here [PDF] and see if it strikes a chord with your own general data security concerns. Perhaps you need a VM data guardian too.Sponsored: Customer Identity and Access Management