Many IT professionals we have met have confused Secured2 with a technology called ‘data sharding’. Sharding has been available for years and was introduced in the 90’s to facilitate horizontal scaling of a database. It breaks data into two or more chunks called logical shards. These shards get distributed across separated database nodes called physical shards. So, all the shards when combined equal the entire dataset. Sharding was developed because it solved the problem of spreading the load of large databases allowing for faster processing. Very large database queries can get slow and sharding offers a way to ‘speed up’ the queries. This technique is also contrasted against another scaling technique called vertical scaling, which involves upgrading the hardware to achieve faster queries. This means adding faster CPU and Memory to achieve database speed improvements. Secured2 does not utilize sharding nor is sharding a security technology. It’s a storage technology.

While sharding data can make scaling ‘big data’ easier, it can become a major security liability. If you break a database into chunks (shards), the chunks are threaded together so a hacker can string the database back together if they can access just one node of the sharded database. Since all shards are logically connected to one another in multiple nodes, more nodes equal more threat because the threat canvass increases. The other challenge is since sharding is a ‘table’ related function, any corruption of a table can make it very difficult to return the database to its unsharded state. So sharding simply put is a data base acceleration technology, not a data security technology.

Examples of Data Sharding