Why Such a Stampede to The Cloud?

You can hardly turn around these days without hearing something about “the cloud.” Is it true that there is a mass migration under way from local data centers to cloud service companies? For those who make the move, why are they doing it and what do they hope to achieve?

The Cloud You Don’t Know
Cloud storage is the big app that’s getting all the press, but unlimited server capacity is also a strong draw. One application that you may not be thinking of is Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This is a replacement for your in-house telephone system. Yes, you still have phones, but they plug into your data network rather than their own telephone wiring. There is no switching system in-house. That’s in the cloud.

Why Hosted PBX?
You get rid of all the headaches associated with buying and maintaining the in-house system, including all of those moves, adds and changes. Plus, you pay only for what you need. Add phones as you need them and pay by the month for each one in service. Don’t need them anymore due to downsizing or change of business direction? Get rid of ‘em. Some providers will even give you the phones so you don’t have to buy them yourself. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

How can the cloud help your business?
Get the latest on competitive cloud services available for your business operations.

Cyber Security Threat Protection In the Cloud

In days of yore, when castles were in vogue, the nobles found that massive stone fortifications were not enough to secure them from determined invaders. What they did was to ring the castle grounds with a deep water-filled ditch called a moat. This effectively prevented sieges from battering rams and tunneling under the castle walls. The lesson here is that your infrastructure is much easier to defend if you don’t let the bad guys anywhere near the main line of defense.

Now let’s fast-forward to the 21st century and see how these medieval lessons-learned can protect our networks. Our massive stone castle wall is now a firewall. It’s effective in preventing most penetrations into the network. Like real stone fortifications and wooden gates, that firewall can only hold out so long against massive assaults at the network edge. What we need is a modern day moat. This is an electronic moat, of course, and it needs to surround our network but not be in it. Where can we get that layer of protection? How about in the cloud?

The cloud might just be the perfect first line of defense for local networks. It’s an idea that makes so much sense that MegaPath, a major networking service provider, is taking exactly that approach in a solution they call Unified Threat Management (UTM). This suite of managed security services can be implemented completely in the cloud, completely on-site or within a hybrid private/public configuration.

MegaPath’s UTM suite is offered in the form of Security as a Service (SaaS). It’s a multilayer approach that can easily fend off unsophisticated attempted break-ins and stand up to higher threat blended attacks. This suite also coordinates security alerting, logging, reporting, compliance and response.

What’s in the SaaS suite? It starts with an advanced firewall that features deep packet inspection with up to 500 firewall policies. Intrusion prevention features multi-layered and blended attack detection that handles both known and unknown threats. A powerful anomaly detector identifies and stops zero-day threats to all network types, including wireless.

No good network security system would be without anti-virus and anti-malware these days. This one has both signature and rules based blocking. Anti-spam deals with the onslaught of unwanted messages and deletes or simply tags them depending on your policy. There’s nothing like having to work your way through hundreds or thousands of spam messages each day to kill employee productivity.

Speaking of productivity, just what are all those employees browsing on the Internet anyway? Make sure their time is spent on company sanctioned activities with white and black lists and policy-based content filtering. Web application control goes a step further to give you precise control of apps like IM, chat, and voice or video on social media sites.

You’ll have data loss prevention with real time detection and prevention of your sensitive company data being transferred outside the company. That includes credit card, healthcare or financial data that is literally worth its weight in gold. Vulnerability scanning checks internal and external IP addresses to find and fix vulnerabilities in real time. Quarterly scans are implemented for PCI compliance. File integrity monitoring watches for unauthorized access or changes to critical system or configuration files.

Managed logging and security information management round out the MegaPath SaaS suite. These collect data and provide the alerting, reporting and archival you need for proper management. Portal based workflow management and tracking demonstrates due diligence in meeting organizational security policies and compliance reporting.

Are you feeling a bit vulnerable with the limited firewall and virus protection you have now? Sadly, the cost of one major breaking can far exceed the amount you’d spend preventing it with an effective cyber security solution. Now would be an excellent to investigate managed security services from MegaPath and other top tier network service providers.



Note: Photo of medieval castle and moat courtesy of Christophe.Finot on Wikimedia Commons.

Amazon's CloudFront Moves In for Content Delivery

It's been a long time since Amazon.com was just about selling books. Oh, they still sell books and most any other retail item you'd want. But Amazon is also a network computing company. Somewhere along the line it occurred to Amazon management that the gigantic computing and network infrastructure they built to power their online shopping empire is exactly what other businesses wanted, if only they could afford it.

Now they can, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon is offering its $15 billion global computing infrastructure to small, medium and large companies as a suite of cloud computing resources. These include the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB for database inquiries, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for storing messages as they travel between computers, and now Amazon CloudFront for content delivery.

What makes Amazon a good candidate for delivering content is its worldwide network with worldwide edge locations. Think of these as analogous to POPs or Points of Presence for carriers. Essentially, Amazon has network resources and connections from its private network to the Internet in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan. There are 8 locations scattered across the US, 4 in Europe and one each in Hong Kong and Japan. When a user requests something from your Website, Amazon serves up the content from the location that makes the most sense at time. That's usually the one closest to the user.

This is how all content delivery networks work. In essence, they bypass most of the Internet by creating their own private network for the content they are serving. Those networks also usually cache instances of the objects at multiple locations so that one central server doesn't get overwhelmed and network bandwidth doesn't have to be unlimited. The cache servers connect to the Internet at their remote locations and feed a limited number of users.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are likely to expand as the demand for video and other high bandwidth services strain the Internet's backbone to the point of snapping. Internet service providers (ISPs) are also contracting with CDNs to take some pressure off their congested networks, as network neutrality forces keep them from implementing classes of service or just cutting off certain bitstreams.

Amazon's CloudFront is designed to be simple to use and priced by use rather than a flat fee. You use it by storing your objects in an Amazon S3 storage bucket. You'll get a CloudFront URL unique to your content from the CreateDistribution API. That's the address you advertise on your Website. CloudFront will take care of figuring out how to most efficiently deliver your content.

What kind of capacity can CloudFront handle? The defaults are 1,000 Mbps bandwidth for data transfer with a peak rate of 1,000 requests per second. You can request higher limits if you need them.

Amazon CloudFront is targeted at companies that distribute software, have lots of traffic to their websites, or deliver rich media files such as audio and video content.

Should you go with a content delivery network or run your own server farm? You can get prices for CloudFront and other services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Compare these with what you'll pay to run your own content servers and for bandwidth to your IT center or colocation facility.