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CAMPBELL, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 03/12/13 -- Panzura, a leading provider of global cloud storage solutions, today announced that the US Department of Commerce (DOC) National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has certified that the award-winning Panzura Global Cloud Storage System is the first cloud-integrated storage platform to achieve Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation. FIPS was established by NIST in response to the 2004 Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 to help secure intra-government communication using common and robust identification verification. Panzura is also compliant with the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) for information technology products. Panzura's leading security compliance achievements were key considerations in its selection by DOC as its cloud storage platform for backup and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) as the core technology to consolidate storage across 265 of its sites.

Panzura also added FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated Hardware Security Module (HSM) to provide high performance crypto acceleration. The encryption keys are never exposed providing logical and physical protection from non-authorized access including potential hardware tampering attempts.

In 2009, the Obama administration announced a new government cloud computing initiative designed to cut infrastructure costs and enhance the greenness of government computing. A key part of this initiative is to move data off expensive local storage and into the cloud. Until now, data security concerns have tempered federal agency enthusiasm for cloud storage. Panzura's new certification brings both seamless integration with cloud storage and robust security features to all branches of US government.

"FIPS validation is quite difficult to achieve but is increasingly required by Federal agencies and contractors," said Robert R. Moore, Senior Vice President of Storage Solutions, Carahsoft. "As Panzura's public sector partner, we congratulate the company on this achievement and look forward to leveraging this certification to drive even broader Federal adoption of Panzura's Global Cloud Storage System."

"Panzura's completion of FIPS 140-2 validation represents a significant milestone in the development of cloud storage for Federal agencies and contractors," said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director at IDC. "As the first cloud-integrated storage platform to meet this requirement, Panzura has broken through a major barrier to gain widespread cloud adoption by security conscious organizations."

The Panzura Global Cloud Storage System provides a secure, robust platform to Federal agencies for cloud-integrated NAS, capacity centralization, multi-directional data exchange, archiving, backup, and disaster recovery with complete IT control. Dubbed "NetApp in the Sky" by analysts, Panzura brings all of the features and performance of local NAS for Federal data plus the cost and scalability benefits of cloud storage without requiring any changes to existing infrastructures, all while meeting Federal security standards. Panzura partners with all major cloud storage providers, including Amazon, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, and Nirvanix.