Once you have decided that utilizing the cloud is the right decision for your business, you will need to find the right provider and datacenter. You are placing all of your important data or even your company’s entire IT infrastructure in the hands of this provider, so you must make sure that you choose the right one.

 

The best way to find the right cloud provider is to begin by talking to some of the provider’s current clients. These are the people who have already made the decision to trust the provider, and they will have the best insight into how the provider works and what it can offer. Try some of these questions to discover more about the service that you are considering:

• Did you find the on-boarding process relatively easy to accomplish?
• What is the technical support like when you encounter problems?
• Have you personally experienced any serious security concerns or incidents?
• How have your security concerns been handled by the provider?

 

If you are dissatisfied with any of the responses to these questions, you do not have to use that particular provider. Keep looking and asking questions until you find a cloud service that meets your needs and that makes you feel comfortable.

 

Technology is constantly changing and improving, and you need to be able to trust that your datacenter will keep up with the evolution of security needs. For any cloud service, find out whether there are security protocols in place, including:

• Physical security of the datacenter
• Environmental controls
• Back-up measures for power and internet
• Back-up measures for your data
• Technical support when you need it

 

Frequent system audits are also necessary in order to ensure that all datacenters meet or exceed industry standards for data security. When you are searching for a cloud provider, ask potential candidates about their compliance to SSAE-16/SOC1. This set of standards measures the amount of control that a datacenter maintains over your sensitive data and financial information. An audit will report any flaws in data flow. You should also inquire about compliance to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This regulation ensures the security and privacy of private health information that is stored or hosted in a datacenter.

If your cloud provider’s datacenter is compliant with both of these standards, you can rest assured that your sensitive data will be monitored and its integrity will be maintained.

Choosing to put your business information or IT infrastructure in a cloud provider’s datacenter rather than housing it on-site is an important decision that requires careful vetting of your potential provider. Once you have chosen the right provider, you can trust that their datacenter will keep your company’s important information safe and secure.

 

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Ever wondered what goes inside those state of the art datacenters that run ‘the cloud’? Here is a sneak peak on day 1 as TurnKey Internet (https://turnkeyinternet.net) is expanding its New York Datacenter servicing the Capital Region with Colocation, Cloud Services and Disaster Recovery backup solutions.

More videos and pictures coming soon… Stay tuned!

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Part I: Definition of net neutrality; definition of parties involved; examination of parties’ roles; detrimental to new business development

Net neutrality, as defined by the Federal Communications Commission is: “The ‘Open Internet’ is the Internet as we know it. It’s open because it uses free, publicly available standards that anyone can access and build to, and it treats all traffic that flows across the network in roughly the same way. The principle of the Open Internet is sometimes referred to as “net neutrality.” Under this principle, consumers can make their own choices about what applications and services to use and are free to decide what lawful content they want to access, create, or share with others. This openness promotes competition and enables investment and innovation.”

 

There are basically only three parties to the whole internet/net neutrality equation:

1. Retail Traffic carriers: such as cable companies, phone companies, satellite companies, etc.
2. Content providers: such as Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
3. End users: you and me

 

The whole net neutrality issue has come about because the traffic carriers, want to charge content providers a fee for “fast lane” service to deliver their content to the end users.

 

So what’s wrong with this picture?  Here’s what’s wrong with it…. You and I pay a monthly fee to a traffic carrier for X amount of bandwidth.  You and I want to watch a movie or listen to a song from a content provider.  Hey, we have paid a fee for our bandwidth so we rightfully expect to be able to utilize that bandwidth whenever we want to.  The problem is, the traffic carriers have oversubscribed their networks.  Let’s say a traffic carrier serves a neighborhood of 1000 homes and they give each home 5Mbps of bandwidth and, the total bandwidth that the traffic carrier can carry on their main circuit to that neighborhood is 500Mbps.  This means that if 100 homes are utilizing the full 5Mbps of bandwidth they have paid for, the other 900 homes will have no bandwidth and won’t be able to use the internet.  Now, bear in mind that this is the theoretical limit.  Since data is moved in bits and pieces, all 1000 homes in the neighborhood would have at least some access to the net but if everyone maxed their connection at the same time, everyone’s connection would slow to a crawl since the maximum available bandwidth in this example is only 500Mbps.  The traffic carriers are gambling that only a certain percentage of the end users will be online at any given point in time and that only a certain percentage of end users will be using the maximum bandwidth that they have paid for at any given point in time.  Quite frankly, that’s a workable model and one that has prevailed over time.  The problem is – what if all the end users want to use their fully allotted bandwidth all at the same time? If that happens, then the traffic carriers cannot provide what the end users have paid for because they don’t have that much bandwidth.  This is known as oversubscribing your network.

So, what the traffic carriers want to do is to charge the content providers in order to give the content providers’ data, priority over other types of traffic.  This is completely wrong because the content providers host their servers at a data center (or multiple data centers) and they are already paying the data centers for all the bandwidth they need.  It is the traffic carriers who have oversubscribed their networks and yet it’s the traffic carriers who want to charge the content providers.

The content providers are not the problem.  The content providers have paid their hosting company(ies) for ample bandwidth to move their data to the end users.  It is the traffic carriers who have oversubscribed their networks that are causing the issue.  So, the traffic carriers want to charge the content providers to prioritize their traffic.  Which raises another question… if the content providers’ traffic is prioritized over other traffic, then what does that do to your VoIP phone service, or the content you’re trying to get from a company that doesn’t pay to have their traffic prioritized, or your email?  What needs to happen here is there should be no charge to the content provider.  The traffic carriers need to increase their overall capacity so that the end users can download whatever they want whenever they want it at the maximum speed that they have paid the traffic carrier for.

Think about this… if your next-door-neighbor downloads content from a content provider who has paid the traffic carrier a fee to prioritize their traffic and you are downloading something from a content provider who has *not* paid an additional fee to the traffic carrier, you could see your download slow to a crawl while the traffic carrier prioritizes the traffic of the paying content provider over that of the traffic from a nonpaying content provider.  Under this scenario, you, and the content provider you are using, are both being penalized so the traffic carrier can prioritize the data of the paying content provider.

If traffic carriers are allowed to charge content providers to prioritize their traffic, that may become an insurmountable barrier to countless new businesses that could potentially exist.  Think of it this way… suppose content providers have to pay traffic carriers to carry their traffic – in this scenario, what happens when someone comes up with a new idea, like youtube?  Can you imagine a couple kids in a garage that come up with a great idea but next to no one can download the content because the kids are running a startup and they don’t have the type of cash needed to pay traffic carriers to prioritize their content??  Think about how that will stifle competition and not allow for the latest and greatest ideas to get out to the public.

 

This will be a multiple part series since there is so much ground to cover on this topic.  Stay tuned for more.

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