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About Object Storage

In object storage or Object-based Storage Devices (OSD), data is organized into flexible-sized objects that abstract the physical blocks of data, in contrast to block-oriented interfaces that read and write fixed sized blocks of data, like file storage or block storage. Objects include data, a globally unique identifier and metadata for indexing and management.

Object storage also provides programmatic interfaces (mostly RESTful APIs) to manipulate data for CRUD, versioning, replication, life-cycle management and data transfer. Applications don't need to go through an operating system's storage drivers to manipulate data, they simply send get, put, or delete requests to the storage system.

Object storage has the following benefits:

  1. durable, built-in data integrity (e.g. in case of disk failure),
  2. available, highly available via REST APIs at the manager layer,
  3. scalable, in order of terabytes (TBs), petabytes (PBs), and greater, unavailable in file or block storage,
  4. flexible, access from anywhere via REST APIs,
  5. secure, encrypt at-rest and in-transit.

Usage

Object storage is often used for handling large amounts of unstructured data, including email, video, photos, web pages, audio, sensor data and other types of media and web content, both textual and non-textual.

Use cases are:

  1. Disaster recovery (DR) and backup (BC),
  2. AI and analytics, as a data lake in combination with Spark and Tensorflow,
  3. cloud native, startups combining cost-effectiveness of cloud native with flexibility of object storage,
  4. data archive, e.g. media files.

Standards

The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) is an American standards organization for computer and communications standards. Its T10 committee is devoted to Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) technology and this T10 committee has published 2 standards for Object-Based Storage Devices (OSD):

  • Object-Based Storage Device Commands (OSD), INCITS 400-2004 (R2013), InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
  • Object-Based Storage Devices - 2 (OSD-2), INCITS 458-2011 (R2016), InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards. 15 March 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2013.

About IBM Cloud Object Storage

The IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) offers a few features that help secure your data. IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) actively participates in several industry compliance programs and provides the following compliance, certifications, attestations, or reports as measure of proof:

  • ISO 27001,
  • PCI-DSS for Payment Card Industry (PCI) USA,
  • HIPAA for Healthcare USA, (including administrative, physical, and technical safeguards required of Business Associates in 45 CFR Part 160 and Subparts A and C of Part 164),
  • ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management,
  • ISO 27017,
  • ISO 27018,
  • ISO 31000 Risk Management Principles,
  • ISO 9001 Quality Management System,
  • SOC1 Type 2 (SSAE 16), (System and Organization Controls 1),
  • SOC2 Type 2 (SSAE 16), (System and Organization Controls 2),
  • CSA STAR Level 1 (Self-Assessment),
  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ready,
  • Privacy shield certified.

At a high level, information on IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) is encrypted, then dispersed across multiple geographic locations, and accessed over popular protocols like HTTP with a RESTful API.

SecureSlice distributes the data in slices across geo locations so that no full copy of data exists on any individual storage node, and automatically encrypts each segment of data before it is erasure coded and dispersed.

The content can only be re-assembled through IBM Cloud’s Accesser technology at the client’s primary data center, where the data was originally received, and decrypted again by SecureSlice.

Data-in-place or data-at-rest security is ensured when you persist database contents in IBM Cloud Object Storage.

You also have a choice to use integration capabilities with IBM Cloud Key Management Services like IBM Key Protect (using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware security modules (HSMs)) and Hyper Protect Crypto Services (built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware) for enhanced security features and compliance.

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3. Create Object Storage Instance.