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.

Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

You have many options when it comes to hosting for email, websites and application software. Let’s take a look at the tradeoffs to consider what's involved in making a good decision for your particular business situation.

You might think that the best solution is to do it yourself. This is how many, many companies got their start on the Internet and how larger companies still roll. At a minimum, you need a computer that acts as the file server plus a bandwidth connection. In-house that connection can be your LAN. If you want remote access, you’ll need a telecom line to get you to the Internet or as a private line connection.

An advantage of in-house hosting is that you have easy access to the equipment and complete control over what gets done to each server and when. Security is enhanced when everything is done over the LAN with no outside connections.

The downside of being able to do everything yourself is having to do everything yourself. You need to buy the equipment, build the environmentally controlled data center, provide physical security, do all installations, repairs and maintenance, and keep a constant vigil in case something goes awry. As you know, there are always things going awry.

This is the reason many companies consider buying their hosting rather than being in the hosting business themselves. You can start by simply outsourcing the data center itself. Companies that provide public data center facilities offer colocation services. You colocate or move into a provider’s facility. That facility provides the equipment racks and cages, redundant electrical power, environmental control, fire suppression, physical security and easy connectivity to telecom bandwidth services. You provide the servers and other appliances, which you install or contract for the colo facility personnel to install.

Some colocation companies have gone beyond just providing space and hookups. You can now rent servers and the labor to install and maintain them. You are still responsible for what’s running on the server other than the operating system, but you’ll have a tech staff available 24/7 to monitor your equipment and effect repairs if necessary.

It’s only a small step from renting equipment at a colocation center to renting a hosting service and not having to worry about the equipment at all. Small companies and home-based businesses may be able to get by with shared hosting, where you share a single physical server with many other clients. You have no access to the common operating system, but can upload files for your business. Shared hosting has become a commodity service and only costs a few dollars a month now. However, the performance of your site can vary depending on how heavily others are loading the server.

To regain control, you’ll probably want to rent a dedicated or private server. This is a physical server that only runs your files. Most of the time you'll gain root access to the machine, something that you never get with shared hosting. If you need even more capacity, you can upgrade to a larger server with more memory, CPU cores and disk storage.

Cloud hosting goes a step further. Cloud services are virtualized, often under the control of VMware. The cloud facility consists of rack after rack of physical servers and hard drives. They are connected to the outside word by multiple fiber optic bandwidth services. The idea is to have enough physical resources to handle any conceivable customer request. You don’t rent a particular server in the cloud. You rent a virtual server. It behaves just like a physical server, but may be one of many virtual servers running on the same machine. It is also possible that your one virtual server may span multiple physical servers.

Both dedicated hosting services and cloud hosting services allow you to rent rather than own the IT resources you need. You also save the expense and staffing required to operate this equipment around the clock. This is referred to as trading CAPEX (Capital Expense) for OPEX (Operating Expense), or rent vs buy.

The cloud goes one step further in virtualizing all physical resources. Many clouds are self-healing, such that if one piece of equipment fails another is automatically substituted. Cloud resources are also rapidly scalable. You typically have a web-based control panel that you use to provision (order) more or fewer resources. Extra servers can be added in minutes rather than days or longer. They can also be released when they are no longer needed so you aren’t paying for unneeded resources.

Are you suspicious that owning and running your own IT data center resources may be costing you more that you really need to be paying? You’re probably right. Which solution is the right one is a decision specific to your company. Get more information and pricing for cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting services to compare with what you are doing now.



Note: Photo of data center equipment courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Hosting vs VPS

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a hosting solution for web sites that have grown beyond shared hosting service but don’t quite require the expense and support that comes with running a completely private server. Now there is another choice that lets you scale up and down rapidly and lets you pay only for what you use.

That answer is cloud server hosting. We’re hearing a lot of buzz about cloud computing versus running your own data center. Many companies never got to the point of investing in an full-fledged in-house data center. They don’t even get to the point of installing a rack in the back room with a few servers for web hosting, email and the like. Why? Because outsourcing all that to hosting services has become too attractive.

The smallest companies, like those run by independent professionals, small retailers, design firms and others, most likely begin with a customized template site offered by a local web services company that also provides the hosting. As they grow beyond the “brochure” site stage or want to get into their own design and hosting, they sign up with one of the low cost hosting services you find online, such as HostGator. When you’re paying less than $4 a month for a hosting plan, there’s not much incentive to do it all yourself

How can companies offer hosting for so little and still make money? The low cost hosting plans are all in the category of shared hosting. The control panel gives you the illusion that you have a server all to yourself. Not by a long shot. There can be dozens or even hundreds of other websites that you are unaware of all on that same server. Your only indication that others are using resources is that the site may run slower at times. If you use too many resources, you hosting company may contact you to say you’ve outgrown the shared hosting plan and need to move up to a virtual private server.

What’s a virtual private server? It’s the intermediate step between shared hosting and having a dedicated server all to yourself. A dedicated server gives you a complete machine with processor, memory and disk storage all under your control. It also means you have to pay for and manage an expensive resource. If you don’t need all those those resources, they just go to waste. If you need more, you have to contract for a larger dedicated server or a cluster of servers. That gets very pricey very fast.

VPS hosting takes advantage of virtualization software. A physical server is logically partitioned into a number of virtual servers. Each one looks and acts like a stand-alone physical server. Only you and your hosting service know that you are running a virtual server rather than a private one. The cost is much less because the physical hardware is being shared among multiple virtual private servers.

Virtual private servers not only give you more resources, but you’ll also get full root access so you can install whatever software you want and customize it to your heart’s content. You still have the limitation of sharing a physical machine and the difficulty of scaling up or down if your requirements change.

Enter cloud hosting. The idea behind cloud computing is that someone else has created a gigantic pool of resources that includes processors, RAM memory, hard drives and bandwidth. Rather than sell you a fixed chunk of this pool, they rent access to it. The same virtualization principles that you have with virtual private hosting apply, but the resource pool is nearly infinitely deep. That means you can easily scale to meet your current needs and ramp up or down later on if things change.

Cloud hosting servers are available with your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems, guaranteed commitment of CPU cycles, RAM and hard disk space, hardware redundancy for high reliability, full root/administrative access, dedicated IP address, automatic nightly data backups, and the ability to add familiar control panels such as cPanel and WHM. For all this you pay by the hour for what you use and there is no commitment, contracts or setup fees. If you don’t need one or more servers, just cancel them without penalty.

What type of hosting works best for your company? Most organizations will do well to compare VPS, collocated private servers and cloud hosting options. Get prices and features to decide the best solution for your business.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.