Cloud file storage vendor CTERA has made a number of enhancements to its offering as it reports consistent growth for the year.
At this week’s IT Press Tour in Rome, CEO Oded Nagel said CTERA “doubled” new business in 2023, and saw a 30 percent increase in its annual recurring revenue (ARR).
The firm also launched a new partner program last year to improve benefits for partners, and in June signed a go-to-market alliance with Hitachi Vantara for cloud file services.
Nagel said: “The biggest sales growth has been seen in North America, although with the help of the Hitachi Vantara alliance, we expect to see higher growth in Asia too.”
Product improvements also helped growth, not least the commercial introduction of the company’s integrated ransomware protection, and version 1 of its WORM Vault secured data technology.
CTERA execs at the presentation then outlined what else the company was rolling out and about to announce, as part of the effort to grow the company further, and win a larger share of the very crowded cloud data storage and management market.
The overarching theme was moving from “passive” protection of data to “active” protection of data, and “offense rather than defense.”
Saimon Michelson, VP of alliances, said: “If you have backup, that’s not the end of the story, although some organizations think that.
“If you have 1 billion files, it can take a lot of work to restore your systems after a ransomware attack, although it’s best not to be infected in the first place.”
To help prevent the infection or distortion of a company’s main business data, an updated version of WORM Vault is being introduced this second quarter to bring “immutability.”
New features include Legal Hold, Object Lock, and Chain of Custody. Legal Hold, for instance, means no one can change accounts according to policies, which can come in handy when considering legal/litigation files.
With Object Lock, there is immutability all the way to a data bucket end-to-end, and Chain of Custody retains all metadata end-to-end. All the new features were developed in partnership with Hitachi Vantara, said CTERA.
The firm’s ransomware protection is already being used by “top banks,” Fortune 500 companies, and health and federal bodies.
We were briefed on a major enhancement to this protection, which will be officially announced later this month, and it is focused on detecting attempted hacks on the network, and preventing exfiltration of data in the first place.
