Comply

RainStor has been architected to support long term retention and accessibility of data and therefore provides unique retention capabilities enabling a greater level of control over the data which is not provided by traditional transactional databases. RainStor retains both the metadata (data types, layout specifications) pertaining to the user data being loaded, as well as the data values themselves each time the data is imported. This level of encapsulation means that user data and its corresponding structure is separately captured and stored each time changes are made to the source application or database where the data is coming from.

Schema Evolution and Versioning

With full data encapsulation, RainStor is able to capture the unique source schema at time of ingestion which allows changes and versions to source data models to be stored which ultimately supports a variety of query options without the need to backup or restore the data.

In contrast, other repositories require backups to be made (to tape or exported to XML) at specific points in time, and supporting a query requires an expensive procedure which involves the restore of the data, the application and potentially the historical RDBMS version.

Security and Authentication

RainStor’s security model comprises five layers that work collectively to ensure the security, privacy and integrity of data within the stores. These multiple layers support various controls and policies around user access, auditing and encryption which ensure your retained data is secure and only in the hands of authorized personnel based on various roles across your organization.

Audit Trails and Encryption

RainStor maintains a full audit trail of activity and provides query access to both audit and log records. RainStor maintains detailed log files that include a history of queries and loggable operations and these are also exposed for query.

The privacy of data within RainStor can be assured with encryption. The data stored can be encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit algorithm. Because data partitions are highly compressed before they are encrypted, the encryption/decryption overhead is significantly reduced in comparison with a standard RDBMS implementation.

Immutability

With data only ever appended to RainStor (until expired on the basis of a policy set at import time) and with independent partitions stored in simple on-disk containers, the data model is naturally read-only and object-based. Accordingly, RainStor is able to commit data directly to immutable data storage systems, such as Content Addressable Storage (CAS) and Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) devices, to further ensure the integrity and availability of data and audit trails.

Record Lifecycle Policies

Expiry

RainStor removes data on a policy basis with the expiry policies created at data import time. Policies can be set at the partition level and down to the record level. When policies dictate that individual records be expired, the removal is logical in nature which effectively masks them from the query engine.

Legal Hold & Tagging

RainStor provides a legal hold facility to override expiry polices for any record or group of records. Accordingly, qualifying records are retained irrespective of any other policy definitions that might have applied and that legal hold will persist indefinitely until it is removed.