Share this:
An interview with Racktop Systems Co-Founder & CTO Jonathan Halstuch and Visual One Intelligence & Clear Technologies President & COO Phil Godwin.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. You can watch the full interview here.
Storage Security in 2025: Why Security & Storage Teams Are Finally Converging
The landscape of storage security is transforming. While data storage and cybersecurity traditionally operated in separate silos, that separation is rapidly disappearing according to Jonathan Halstuch, CTO and Co-Founder of RackTop Systems.
“We’re seeing a convergence where before [storage and security] were very siloed,” Halstuch explains.
“Security was treated and thought about by one team, storage was thought about by the infrastructure and operations team… We’re starting to see those roles converge, just like the CIO and CSO roles have accountability to each other.”
A Shift in Storage Security Requirements
While many storage vendors are retrofitting security features onto existing products, RackTop approached storage security from the opposite direction – building it into their foundation using security standards developed for intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense.
“My co-founder and I had been working in the DOD, in the national security and intelligence space, trying to protect their data at large scale infrastructure where you’re worried not only about a nation state like China… but also insider threats,” says Halstuch. “The government was dealing with massive scale of data… And none of the products on the market addressed all of that. They couldn’t do it at scale, and they couldn’t do it at speed.”
Why Traditional Storage Security Falls Short
One common misconception in storage security, according to Halstuch, is that backup systems provide adequate protection against modern cyber threats. “You constantly hear backup vendors say that backups [are] your best protection against ransomware. It’s not a protection at all. In fact, it’s your last resort for recovery,” he explains.
The problem? According to studies cited by Halstuch, 92% of ransomware attacks now involve data theft as their first action.
“Backups aren’t going to do anything to protect you against that. Immutable snapshots aren’t going to do anything to protect you against data theft. You need something that can block and stop the attack as soon as you start to detect it.”
That’s why RackTop developed what Halstuch calls a “data-centric zero trust approach” to storage security – one that evaluates trust for each file operation in real time.
“With a traditional NAS, an admin would give you read-write permissions to a folder… and you’d have those permissions until somebody went in and took them away,” he explains.
“With [our approach], an admin would give you rewrite permission to that folder. But if all of a sudden you start to read a bunch of data – well, you may be an insider threat stealing data or your account might be compromised. And we’re going to at least alert on that. Or if you start to read the files and encrypt it… we’re going to block you and alert on it.”
Storage Security Demands Across Industries
This enhanced approach to storage security is finding particular traction in three key sectors: healthcare, government, and higher education.
Healthcare: With petabytes of medical imaging data that must be retained long-term, healthcare organizations are frequent targets for both cybercriminals seeking financial gain and foreign adversaries interested in citizen data. “They’re a huge target… and not just for ransomware and financial gain,” notes Halstuch. “You don’t want to have to shut a hospital down because they’ve been hit with a ransomware attack and divert patients to another location.”
State & Local Government: As another sector providing critical citizen services, state and local governments face similar targeting. Storage security deployments can range from small virtual machines to large implementations for law enforcement agencies handling body cam footage and forensic evidence.
Higher Education & Research: Recent false claims acts against major universities have created a “wake up call” regarding storage security requirements. “People are saying, ‘OK, I’m going to have to do this. How do I do that?'” says Halstuch. While cloud providers offer some solutions, they often prove expensive and inflexible for research data sets that require high performance network-attached storage.
The Future of Storage Security: AI on the Horizon
As storage security continues evolving to address new threats, Halstuch sees artificial intelligence as the next frontier – both as a security tool and as a driver of new storage requirements.
“What I really see as our next big jump is moving into operationalizing data to support AI,” he explains. “A big workload that we’re starting to see come up is that AI workload… Not all of it requires high performance, because some of it’s kind of patchy in storage, but you need to make sure you have the right type of storage to meet those various AI workloads.”
The goal remains helping organizations extract maximum value from their data while maintaining robust storage security. As Halstuch puts it: “We’ve always said data is the most valuable asset of the organization. And now we want to make it even more valuable for them.”
About Racktop Systems
Since its founding in 2010, RackTop Systems has led a transformative approach to Cyberstorage protection that aligns with a new era of data-driven cyber attacks. Engineered by U.S. Intelligence Community veterans, RackTop’s best-in-class BrickStor security solution follows an innovative Zero Trust model that empowers the public and private sector to safeguard their data from the escalating presence of ransomware and insider threats.
RackTop works with a diverse range of clients and partners from the healthcare, utilities, financial services, higher education, and advertising/media industries, as well as federal, state and local governments, to provide enhanced data security and solve complex data protection challenges. With visibility into the in-and-out points and integrations of their enterprise, companies can take proactive steps to alleviate the real root of the cyberattack landscape: data breaches. With RackTop’s unified Cyberstorage software, our clients gain real-time visibility into data usage to both detect and respond to attacks before their valuable data assets are stolen or destroyed.
For more information on RackTop’s Cyberstorage offerings, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
About Visual One Intelligence®
Visual One Intelligence® is an infrastructure tool with a unique approach—guaranteeing better & faster monitoring, observability, and FinOps insights by leveraging resource-level metrics across your hybrid infrastructure.
By consolidating independent data elements into unified metrics, Visual One’s platform correlates and interprets hybrid infrastructure data to illuminate cost-saving and operations-sustaining details that otherwise stay hidden.
These insights lead to fewer tickets, less downtime, lower costs, and more efficient architectures.
