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.

Hosted Network Monitoring Services

Metro and Wide Area Networks are becoming more and more important to businesses. The steady migration toward electronic transactions, online services and cloud storage & computing are making networks a critical part of the business infrastructure. That, in turn, is making networking monitoring a necessary function in every IT department. It breaks down to doing it yourself or contracting with a provider to monitor the network.

Companies have been monitoring their own LANs since they started installing networks. It’s logical to extend that philosophy to include any telecom links between facilities. That includes point to point networks and both public and VPN connections to the Internet. There are good reasons to rethink this approach now. Let’s have a look at how the networking monitoring processing can be improved.

One area of weakness is networks used by smaller businesses. A lot of factories, offices and retail outlets aren’t open or staffed around the clock. What’s going on in the wee hours? Who knows? A construction crew could be working late and cut through the cable that is your last mile connection. The alarm lights on the terminal equipment illuminate, but there is no one around to take action. You come in to open up in the morning and find that you have no network connection. You report it, of course, and the carrier will start the investigation process. You may or may not be back in business by noon. That’s only if you have a good SLA (Service Level Agreement) or a very proactive service provider.

There are measures you can take. You can set up a process to monitor the alarms and ping remote servers periodically to make sure the link is still up. If something goes wrong, you can have it send you or someone on-call in your IT department a text message. Somebody sill has to be awake enough to get the alert and then start working the problem. That involves figuring out if the outage in on the telecom link or in your equipment and contacting the right party to get some corrective action.

Large companies with 24/7 coverage of their data centers and other IT assets may consider this part of their charter. Small and medium companies, especially those with branch offices and critical e-commerce infrastructure, may have the need for faster response but not the budget to provide “just in case” staffing. These are the companies that hosted network monitoring services work wonders for. With hosted monitoring, the responsibility of what’s happening beyond your network’s edge belongs to the service provider. They do have the automated equipment and round-the-clock staffing to keep an eye on every network link to make sure that it is working properly.

In most situations, the network edge is a managed router installed by the service provider. This equipment terminates the line with the proper interface, be it T1, DS3, EoC, EoF or SONET. The other side of the router is where you connect, generally with an Ethernet interface. The router itself is considered “in the loop” as far as network monitoring and testing is concerned. If anything goes wrong, the provider has the ability to test functionality through all their equipment and lines, right on up to your Ethernet connection.

In some cases, you even have the option of letting the service provider include your internal local network within their networking monitoring service. You decide whether to let them have access to the entire network or just a portion. This is the ultimate level of support for smaller companies that have little or no on-site IT staffing.

A particularly robust network security solution is provided by MegaPath, a major facilities-based carrier. MegaPath goes far beyond just monitoring to ensure the network is “up.” They include comprehensive Unified Threat Management (UTM) to implement network security. This involves an advanced firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, web application control and data loss prevention. Network management involves deep packet inspection and uptime monitoring that monitors for latency, jitter, delays and packet loss. It is sometimes difficult for even larger companies to provide this depth of networking monitoring and security.

Are you interested in better management of your network connections at a reasonable cost? You should look into hosted network monitoring and security services suitable for the size of your business and criticality of your network.