Secure To The Core Cloud Hosting

Moving to cloud based solutions is making sense for more and more companies. The cloud offers easy scalability, near-infinite resources, high performance, no maintenance headaches and the opportunity to avoid capital investments and pay only for what you use. The one nagging issue is how secure is the cloud, really?

MegaPath, a major player in private networking and hosted IT services, has taken a big step toward assuring businesses that their data and business process will remain private by introducing a concept it calls “secure to the core.” Just what does secure to the core mean and how can it work for your business?

Nearly every cloud service provider touts its security. This generally centers around the data center itself. Many are SAS 70 Type II and SSAE 16 compliant with physical security that include biometric scanning, a full time security staff, video surveillance and a walled fortress. Inside there are redundant power and cooling systems, fire suppression and multiple WAN connections to the outside world. However, this last group is really more about reliability than security.

With proper personnel screening and all the physical and technical barriers to entry, it’s not that hard to physically keep people out who don’t belong in the data center. It’s more difficult to keep them out when they come in through the Internet.

The Internet is a weak link when it comes to any data security program. The most motivated and talented of wrong-doers operate in this domain. They eagerly stalk potential targets to penetrate and make off with intellectual property, credit card numbers, personal data that can be used for identity theft and anything else of value. It takes talented network security people and an array of firewalls and security appliances to protect high value business, organizational and government assets that face the Internet.

This is where MegaPath has a leg-up on a lot of cloud service providers. They also have the latest in high security data centers that meet stringent industry compliance standards. What MegaPath has that most providers don’t is a large private network completely independent of the Internet.

When you think about it, companies with multiple locations or Intranets that include key suppliers and customers don’t really need the Internet for internal communications. In fact, it is highly desirable to keep internal communications on a private network for both security and performance. MegaPath makes this affordable for all size businesses through their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) fiber optic network. The label switching technology of MPLS makes packet forwarding simple and efficient. It also allows customers to chose from eight levels of QoS (Quality of Service) so that time sensitive packet streams get the priority they need to maintain integrity end to end. This is ideal for enterprise VoIP telephone systems and video conference or telepresence.

MegaPath can offer you MPLS network connections throughout the United States plus Managed SSL VPN, Retail Access SSL and Business Continuity SSL. Their compliance services help companies meet regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, FFIEC/NCUA, HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA and SOX.

Of course, you probably want Internet connections as well to serve the general public and commercial buyers, and for employee access to the vast information resources available worldwide. MegaPath offers a comprehensive security array called UTM or Unified Threat Management. This includes advanced firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-virus protection, Web filtering, anti-spam, Web application control and data loss protection. These UTM services can be implemented within the cloud, at the customer’s premises or in a hybrid configuration.

Are you looking for cloud services that have rigorous physical and network security protections? Get features and pricing for secure network and cloud services from MegaPath and other high quality providers.

Advantages of SSL VPN

Computer security is in the back, if not the front, of every Internet user’s mind right now. Hacking, security breaches, identity theft and malicious bots are terms that show up in national news reports as well as user forums. Everything moving to the cloud is adding to the anxiety of anyone who has sensitive data and wants to keep it personal and private. Little wonder the interest in virtual private networks is greater than ever before.

What is a virtual private network and why would you want that instead of an actual private network?

The answer revolves around our desire for universal connectivity. Most companies started connecting to other locations using private line services, such as T1, DS3 and OC3. These are point to point connections that are reserved for your private use. Only you and the network operators have access to those wires and the data they are transporting. It’s fairly difficult for third parties to tap a private line and examine the packets moving back and forth.

Private lines are defined as private, but that’s not really good enough for high risk companies such as banks and brokerages. To thwart even the most dedicated line “tapper,” they encrypted their data to ensure it stayed private. Encryption is a process that takes plain text and jumbles it in such a way that it appears to be indecipherable nonsense to anyone looking. At the far end of the link, the text is decrypted and returns to its original form.

Private lines are great for communicating within organizations or with a select few suppliers, vendors, consultants and so on. But what if you want to interact with the public at large? For that you need a public, not a private, network. That’s exactly what the Internet was created to do.

The advantage of the Internet is that it connects to nearly every place and every person on Earth. That’s also its weakness. The same universal connectivity that makes it easy for billions of potential customers to reach your website makes it equally easy to do mischief or outright crime. If there was only a way to make the connection between you and your customer secure while still using the public Internet.

That solution is called the VPN or Virtual Private Network. A public network connection can be made virtually private by encrypting the packets that travel between two locations. Your particular stream of traffic is scrambled while the rest of the traffic flowing through the same network connections could be transmitted in the clear.

SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a popular technique to provide the encryption between source and destination. What makes it so popular is that SSL is supported by all modern Web browsers and many other programs, such as Email clients. There is no need to buy or configure separate encryption software used in other VPN approaches.

Anyone with an Internet connection and browser can connect securely to any site that supports SSL. The resulting connection can be called a SSL VPN. It only persists for the length of the session, but can be established at any time. You know that you are on a secure link because the address starts with https: rather than http: The “s” means secure.

Adding SSL to a site involves buying a digital certificate from a trusted certificate authority. That certificate attests to the fact that the site in question is who it says it is and not some impostor. The secure site presents the certificate to the client to prove legitimacy. It may also ask the user for authentication, such as user ID and password, to prove that the user is also legitimate.

What sites use SSL? Most any site handling financial transactions, such as banks, online stores that accept credit cards, webmail providers, cloud storage providers, remote access services, most sites that store personal data and require user logins, and businesses using the Internet to connect remote locations and home workers.

Do you need to provide secure connections for your business? If so, look into the costs and features of Affordable Virtual Private Network solutions. One or more may be just right for your particular needs.