Pure Storage Brings Cyber Resilience, AI Front And Center

‘We’re connecting all of the cyber threat detectors, and instead of waiting until something goes wrong, creating a relative threat signal that can dynamically change storage protection policies. This is adaptive security,’ says Prakash Darji, general manager for digital experience.

Storage technology developer Pure Storage Thursday beefed up its platform with new AI capabilities to improve businesses’ ability to access data wherever it is stored.

The company also continued its push to make data storage more cyber-resilient with the introduction of new capabilities and partnerships to help businesses better anticipate, address and recover from cyberattacks.

The new AI capabilities are built in part on the Pure Storage Intelligent Control Plane first introduced in June, said Prakash Darji, general manager for digital experience at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

“We’re enhancing our Intelligent Control Plane using the power of Model Context Protocol [MCP] and AI to reach into multiple ecosystems to support and extend Pure Fusion across the landscape of other intelligent signals with MCP,” Darji said.

The Pure Storage Intelligent Control Plane is the company’s unified control layer that automates how data is provisioned, protected and governed across an entire data estate.

MCP is a new AI interface that lets systems interact with multiple data sites to provide an AI-native format for a cross-domain communication, Darji said.

“So, for example, if I wanted to talk to VMware and OpenShift to figure out a migration, I can reach into their MCP servers and figure out what’s the config into VMware, what’s the config in OpenShift, all in English, whether I can move all this,” he said. “The ability for the Intelligent Control Plane to reach into the ecosystem is unlocked through MCP.”

Also new is the Pure Storage Cloud, which Darji said expands the company’s Enterprise Data Cloud into the public cloud. Pure Storage’s Enterprise Data Cloud, introduced in June, originally was a control layer that operates above all of the storage arrays and has them operate together as a cloud of storage on a global basis to let enterprises not only manage their storage but also their datasets on a global basis.

Customers know Pure Storage for its unified data plane that virtualizes and connects data across every location into a single fabric, Darji said.

“Here, we’re basically pushing performance and efficiency across a wide variety of surface ‘real estate,’” he said. “We’re enhancing our data reduction with adaptive dedupe for backup and archive to give more efficiency to data storage and backup and archive. For cloud, we’re focused on financial efficiency with a new Pure Storage Cloud. We’re focused on AI efficiency by using the Pure KVA [key-value accelerator] for caching for DynamoDB so you don’t need to recompute everything but instead can use KV Cache Accelerator to hit cache for similar queries.”

Also new is the Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native, a fully managed Azure-native service for Azure VMware Solution aimed at helping customers reduce overhead and easily migrate data without refactoring and decoupling storage from compute, he said.

Pure Storage is also integrating its Portworx Kubernetes container management platform with its Pure Fusion hybrid storage cloud operating model as a single unified platform for data and storage management for all workloads. In addition, it introduced Portworx Pure1 AI Copilot to help businesses monitor their Kubernetes and Portworx clusters via an AI agent.

On the cyber resilience side, the Pure Storage platform has post-quantum cryptography-ready security built into it, Darji said.

“With quantum computing, people are going to be able to hack encryption keys and all of that,” he said. “So we’ve enhanced our platform to be PQC-ready.”

Darji acknowledged that quantum computing is not yet a security issue but said research from organizations like MIT can provide a three- to five-year window into how quantum computing impacts encryption keys.

“When the algorithms are hardened against quantum computing, the industry will have to go and change its encryption methodology,” he said. “Until there’s something post-post-quantum, you’re going to be fine for probably the next 100 or 1,000 years. You have to out-chase the current encryption in quantum computing. We’ve largely adopted new encryption algorithms that have already been proven to be hardened against quantum cryptography.”

Pure Storage is also looking to integrate multiple cyber threat detectors into an adaptive security system, Darji said.

“We’re connecting all of the cyber threat detectors, and instead of waiting until something goes wrong, creating a relative threat signal that can dynamically change storage protection policies,” he said. “This is adaptive security. Think of [physical security company] ADT and Ring. With ADT, when someone breaks your window, your alarm will sound. Ring notifies me that someone’s in my front yard, and I can yell at them through the camera, and then when they get closer to the front door, I can ask someone to go to my home. And then when they get in the house, the alarm will notify the police.”

Pure Storage has also formed strategic alliances with several cybersecurity technology developers.

CrowdStrike is working with Pure Storage to ingest storage data from Pure Storage arrays into CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM technology to provide real-time visibility and automated response to help with policy updates and security data to help stop attacks before they impact critical operations.

In addition, Superna is partnering with Pure Storage to provide file and user monitoring specifically targeting attacks such as data exfiltration and double-extortion ransomware.

Veeam Software also is partnering with Pure Storage to help it deliver cyber resilience as a service.

Cutting costs related to the virtualization landscape along with cyber resilience are two topics that are top-of-mind for customers, said Raphael Meyerowitz, partner go-to-market vice president at New York-based Presidio, which has worked with Pure Storage for 11 or 12 years.

Meyerowitz, who is on Pure Storage’s Partner Advisory Board, told CRN that cyber resilience is not only focused on ransomware protection, but also on mitigation following security issues.

“Some of the technologies that Pure is coming to market with on the cyber resilience side are important, not just from a ransomware protection standpoint, but also from mitigation in terms of if customers actually do get hit by ransomware,” he said. “That’s very important. Pure could become a first line of defense in case customers actually do get a ransomware incident.”

Pure Storage’s embrace of cybersecurity partnerships is a big move for the vendor, Meyerowitz said.

“The native integration into those products is really going to help customers,” he said. “When you look at CrowdStrike, as an example, [it] generates a lot of logs, and Pure Storage can help customers prevent security breaches by having native integration into CrowdStrike. Many customers use Veeam today from a data protection standpoint, so having a service that can be leveraged to ensure that backups are not just taking place but also are resilient is really important.”

Presidio has seen that customers today are looking for products that can natively snap into other products that they have in their environments, Meyerowitz said.

“As an example, Pure Storage is known for storage,” he said. “CrowdStrike is leveraged within a lot of customers for security, and Veeam is leveraged for backups. So the three products right there you know need to be integrated, and I think Pure has done a good job at getting these integrated to help customers.”

Presidio, which was a beta partner of Pure Storage Cloud, is big cloud partner of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and customers are looking for cost- efficiency solutions around the cloud, Meyerowitz said.

“What Pure has come to the table with Pure Storage Cloud is really good because customers can save money by leveraging Pure Storage Cloud instead of purchasing additional nodes,” he said. “And it’s integrated directly into Azure, so it’s kind of a zero-touch solution. It’s very easy to get this going. We have quite a few AVS [Azure VMware Solution] customers. This is going to be a good solution for the market because it can provide customers operational simplicity and reduce customers’ cost.”

Pure Storage has done a nice job with its portfolio, most recently with its new Enterprise Data Cloud, which has been impactful for customers, said Mike Johnson, CEO of EchoStor Technologies, a Norwood, Mass.-based solution provider and Pure Storage channel partner.

“From a data mobility and data management perspective, it’s allowed our customers to move workloads from on-prem, whether that’s in data centers local to the Northeast or across the U.S., out to the major hyperscalers,” Johnson told CRN. “They’ve also done a nice job of scaling out, and this gives them the ability to really steer us to scale up and address data tiering and data mobility.”

Pure Storage continues to innovate in the AI space, which helps EchoStor grow its business with life sciences and health-care customers with large high-performance computing clusters, Johnson said.

“And from a channel perspective, they’re investing more in the channel and revamping some of their programs to suit regional partners like us and not just focusing on the big nationals and global partners,” he said.

Pure Storage’s new security partnerships are important for the company, Johnson said.

“Cybersecurity and cyber threats are at an all-time high,” he said. “And I think Pure has always had a nice security story and posture. But it’s revamping that posture to catch up and fill a gap in their portfolio as they look across the market. It is a powerful message.”