Rework Goes from Systems Integrator to Cloud Broker with New CloudPoint Service

A company known as Rework has gone from a systems integrator specializing in Salesforce.com to becoming the meeting point for various cloud services with its CloudPoint.

According to a ZDNet report, Rework represents a trend where many integrators are diversifying to become cloud solution brokers. Rework’s new strategy involves bundling core cloud-based solutions for human resources, finance and customer relationship management that integrate with current systems.

Cloud brokerages can provide a gateway for many businesses to a combination of cloud services spanning IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. According to MarketsandMarkets estimates, the cloud brokerage market is expected to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018.

For its part, Rework’s new CloudPoint service focuses on brokering different cloud-based applications, while adding additional value to the individual cloud services it offers. Some of the ways it adds value is by through application customizations and increased visibility into how they run and their interdependencies. It also provides a centralized place for dealing with licenses, billing, and security.

Earlier this month, cloud broker ComputeNext raised $4 million in funding to spur its sales and marketing efforts, and to create a platform that makes it easier to navigate different cloud services and providers.

While some have pointed out that cloud brokers might add another layer of complexity, confusion, and cost to cloud computing, they may become necessary for some businesses to navigate multi-cloud environments.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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Only 17 Percent of Businesses Are Fully Prepared for Online Security Incidents: Survey

A new report is shedding light on how unprepared many businesses are towards online security threats.

The new cyber incident response report, carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by security firm Arbor Networks, includes the results of a survey of 360 senior business leaders in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Based on responses, only 17 percent of businesses are fully prepared for an online security incident and over a third of firms (38 percent) have no incident response plan in place.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of encountering a security incident is high, with 77 percent of companies surveyed suffering at least one incident in the past two years.

“In the wake of recent high profile targeted attacks in the retail sector, a company’s ability to quickly identify and classify and incident, and execute a response plan, is critical to not only protecting corporate assets and customer data, but the brand, reputation and bottom line of the company,” Arbor Networks president Matthew Moynahan said in a statement.

However, the study focuses not only on highly public security incidents like the attack on Target before the holidays last year, or the outages plaguing the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2012, but also on smaller attacks that may pass by unnoticed.

Understandably, falling prey to online attacks remains somewhat of a taboo. When not legally required to report them, 57 percent of organisations choose not to voluntarily disclose security incidents. And only a third of companies share information about incidents with other organizations to spread best practice and benchmark their own response.

But there seems to be increasing internal pressure to deal with attacks. The report anticipates that more than 80 percent of organization will have an incident response team and plan in place in the next few years.

“There is an encouraging trend towards formalizing corporate incident response preparations,” EIU senior editor James Chambers said in a statement. “But with the source and impact of threats becoming harder to predict, executives should make sure that incident response becomes an organizational reflex rather than just a plan pulled down off the shelf.”

According to the report, the response plans of attack-ready firms are typically led by the IT department, but also draw upon external resources such as IT forensic experts, specialist legal advisers and law enforcement experts.

Companies would be wise to increase their security responsiveness not only to protect their data, but also their reputation, given that the handling of these incidents often have a way of becoming known to the public.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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How Social Engineering Attacks Target Web Hosting Support Staff

As DDoS attacks and malware become increasingly complex, there is another type of attack that doesn’t rely on much technology, aside from maybe a phone or email, and is just as dangerous.

Called social engineering, this type of attack relies on manipulation and human error, tricking victims or their service providers into turning over sensitive information that could be used to access hosting or other online accounts.

“When a lot of people think security attack the first thing on their minds is decrypting data or software viruses, but the vast majority of attacks, and the biggest flaw that we have in software security, are people. We’re capable of making decisions, and we’re quite capable of making bad ones,” Kevin Jones, chief security officer for Thycotic Software, a Washington, D.C-based company that specializes in IT management software tools for system administrators said.

Founded in 1996 as a software development consultancy, Thycotic Software initially developed its flagship product, an enterprise password management software called Secret Server, out of an internal need. It was released commercially in 2005, and today around 100,000 admins from around the world use Secret Server.

Jones has been at Thycotic Software for over 7 years, and as chief security engineer he works with the company’s development team and customers to understand their security needs.

An example of a security incident involving social engineering happened recently, when an attacker was able to impersonate a PayPal employee, get the victim’s credit card information, and use it in a social engineering attack on GoDaddy and Twitter.

“As most attacks we’ve seen recently, it involved a lot of social engineering, which has become an increasingly persistent form of attacks,” Jones says.

The attacker was after the single-character Twitter handle @N belonging to software developer Naoki Hiroshima. In order to get to the Twitter account, the attacker got the last four digits of the victim’s credit card by impersonating a PayPal employee. He then called GoDaddy as Hiroshima, saying he lost his credit card but he remembered the last four numbers. GoDaddy support let him take over the account with just those last four digits, not a typical authentication means for the hosting company.

“Based on what GoDaddy has said in the past, they don’t really do that. That’s not one of their normal authentication means to confirm a user’s identity,” Jones says. “The other thing was the GoDaddy employee also requested the first two digits of the credit card, and most credit cards almost always start with the same four digits because they are used to identify who makes the card.”

According to a report by PCWorld, GoDaddy said the attacker was “already in possession of a large portion of the customer information needed to access the account at the time he contacted GoDaddy” and “the hacker then socially engineered an employee to provide the remaining information needed to access the customer account.”

“GoDaddy didn’t have a strictly enforced policy on how they’re going to identify who their customers are. Based on what GoDaddy said, that particular GoDaddy support engineer kind of stepped out of their bounds on what they were and were not allowed to do,” Jones says.

GoDaddy said it is “making necessary changes to employee training to ensure we continue to provide industry-leading security to our customers and stay ahead of evolving hacker techniques,” according to a statement.

Once the attacker was in the account, he was able to take control of his PayPal, hosting account, and his email. The attacker eventually seized the victim’s Facebook and Twitter. Hiroshima got access back to his GoDaddy account, but only got his Twitter handle back a couple weeks ago.

“The GoDaddy incident is not unique. It’s certainly very prominent because of who the companies are the parties involved, and the owner of the Twitter handle that was compromised,” Jones says.

For hosting providers, the PayPal-GoDaddy incident sheds some light on the potential gaps in terms of account authentication and making sure support staff are trained to understand how to deal with social engineering attacks.

“As someone that would work with a web hosting company one of my immediate concerns would be what are you doing to identify your customers and ensure that my data is really my data and it really stays with me?” Jones says. “How are you training your support engineers, and how are you renewing and validating things that they are or are not supposed to do? If I were to do business with a web hosting company these would be some of my first questions.”

Jones says that customers should ask their web hosts about their training policies around protecting data and how they ensure they don’t get violated.

“Another thing a web host can do is this employee at some point was able to reset or send a reset code to the attacker. In order to do that the employee must have had some kind of access to a system. Internal auditing is going to be the really key thing there,” Jones says.

“As a web hosting company I would want to make sure I have in place is some sort of irrevocable means  of identifying who you are. If i’m able to provide you a non-variable security pin then that at least can confirm that somehow I have some sort of information for this account, and then we can  open a dialogue and resolve these kinds of situations. Really, the best kind of way to resolve these kinds of breaches is to have a conversation with a human.”

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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LeaseWeb expands the network in Singapore

LeaseWeb launches a CDN of presence point to Singapore, the company announced this week. The movement is established network CDN of LeaseWeb more in Asia, increased the speed in the Asia-Pacific region and increase its overall capacity of 100Gbps to 500Gbps CDN in the world.

High-capacity network is one in part because of the focus on SSD-powered infrastructure, allowing to LeaseWeb target its solution business needs distribution large file.

"Unique solution CDN is SSD-powered 100% storage characteristics," said Maurits van der Schee, CDN Innovation Engineer at LeaseWeb. "Most of the time, CDNs use SSD technology only for a small part of the solution. We decided to give all the power of our ca and use of SSD technology only, in order to maximize the effects of caching and prevent the buffering of videos around the world. »

Architecture CDN of LeaseWeb is open-source based and designed in-house, and its point of presence of Singapore was built with material "high end" transported from Europe.

Point of presence of Singapore is called a "SuperPoP" Army Dutch because of his ability and is the fifth installation of LeaseWeb in the world. The initial expansion of LeaseWeb CDN with four SuperPoPs in Europe and the United States was just completed in October 2013.

The week last LeaseWeb have announced a partnership with the manufacturer of server Huawei.

The world of the CDN market is more and more, but it is the competition, services like cloud OneApp platform facilitate newcomers as CDNlion, just as Apple announces it relies on its own CDN, which leaves Akamai with the challenge that threatens to replace the client CDN $100 million.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and WHIR contributor. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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Ubiquity Hosting Receives Strategic Investment from Private Equity Firm Seaport Capital

Ubiquity Hosting announced on Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from private equity firm Seaport Capital to help grow its IaaS solutions, including a planned expansion in Europe and Asia in 2014.

Neither company has disclosed the specific amount of the investment, though Seaport Capital’s target equity investment size, according to its website, is between $5 – $20 million.

Earlier this year, Ubiquity Hosting merged its Ubiquity Servers and Ubiquity Hosting and launched a new cloud service developed in-house.

“With the rapid expansion of our proprietary cloud platform, it makes sense for us to bring in the right partner to help expand and evolve our IaaS solutions for our dynamic customer base,” Clint Chapman, CEO of Ubiquity Hosting said in a statement. “Seaport Capital’s knowledge and understanding of our industry make them the ideal fit for us.”

Founded in 2004, Ubiquity Hosting is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has more than 8 data centers across 7 cities in the US. It provides dedicated, cloud and managed servers.

“We build our cloud hypervisors around high-clock-speed CPUs that meet or exceed 3.2 GHz, datacenter-grade solid state drives, 10 Gbps network infrastructure, and a low number of tenants per hypervisor that significantly reduces the chance of greedy neighbors. The performance level offered by our cloud solution translates into tremendous business value for our customer base.”

With a focus in the telecommunications, information and business service industries, Seaport Capital says it “invests in opportunities where there is an opportunity to grow cash flow, through acquisition and organic means, to create businesses that are leaders in their region or industry segment.” Seaport Capital’s portfolio includes Peak 10, Logicworks and Net Access Corporation.

“The robust platform developed by Ubiquity Hosting offers customers superb value,” Jim Collis, Seaport Capital Partner said. “We are excited to partner with Clint, Brett, and the rest of the team at Ubiquity Hosting by providing capital and expertise to accelerate their development.”

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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Cloud Sherpas to invest 10 million dollars in new neutral Cloud Advisory

Consultant in cloud and Integrator Sherpas Cloud announced Thursday that it will invest 10 million $ over the next two years to expand its independent advisory Cloud of provider practice.

The advisory programme operates independently of its technology services divisions and will be composed of Councillors about 24 in North America, Europe and Australia. The practice Advisory Cloud will serve as impartial guide to cloud Solutions customers.

Before its Advisory program independent of the provider, the consultants managed more Cloud Sherpas 5,000 implementations of enterprise cloud and guide clients in the evaluation of applications including Salesforce.com and Google DocuSign Enterprise cloud.

Google Apps is a popular choice for organizations in the cloud, with third-party applications, helping to drive this popularity.

With respect, interoperability and security review, the role of a consultant could prove to be a valuable resource for companies looking to implement solutions cloud. Hosting service providers have sought to be a trusted advisor to clients, but this approach is different, because it strives to independent orientation of the provider.

Systems integrators have always been an important link in the channel, and as cloud services have become more frequent, some have shifted gears to meet this demand. For example, earlier this week, System Integrator rework is passed to more of a role of broker of cloud with its new CloudPoint service.

Cloud Sherpas VP Matthew Johnson will take place in practice, CEO David Northington. Cloud Advisory program will officially launch in mid-April at a client event.

"Cloud has fundamentally changed the landscape of technology and business," said Matt Johnson, Cloud Sherpas VP of Global Cloud Advisory. "Move your organization to the cloud is no longer a question of if or when even. Today, the emphasis is on how you will do. Transition to the cloud may seem daunting, but with a proper assessment and strategy, a clear path is possible. "We are excited to formalize our approach to helping customers make this gesture."

Cloud advisory team will help customers navigate their plans of cloud through the Cloud discovery workshop, which includes four key elements: strategy, evaluation of the platform through assessment independent technology provider, the capabilities of the company and plan of transformation of clouds.

Nicole Henderson (12 posts)

Nicole Henderson is the editor-in-Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers news every day and offers online, as well as in print. She holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find it on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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BurstNET informs clients of Colocation of higher prices, changing the location

Some clients of roommates BurstNET sent an e-mail this week to inform them that their media and servers would be displaced to the data centre BurstNET Carolina of the North, and from their next billing cycle, charges would increase to take account of the increase in the cost of electricity.

According to the email put online by several customers, costs now range from $99 per month for a single server to $899 per month for a full rack.

The email notes among the reasons for the price change: "over the years the electric cost is systematically passed up, as well as many other expenses that surround the COLO business. We so far have been absorbing the cost spikes. In addition, BurstNET is one of the only providers that does not require a 36 month contract and invoice not the average $399,00 create charges. »

BurstNET also refers to investments in activities in anticipation of the growth as reasons for the changes.

In a telephone call with Keith Vannan of BurstNET, it notes that all infrastructure of Dunmore, Pennsylvania, North Carolina to provide customers more reliability, connectivity and redundancy which was not possible in Pennsylvania.

"Everything we have from Dunmore is moved to the new facility out in North Carolina," he said, noting that dedicated servers and VPS will move this weekend and colocation will be the last to take the step. "It is not cost effective to have a data center, in northeastern PA between increases in rates in Pennsylvania, in the past 3 or 4 months, as well as the additional bandwidth cost... There are many more out there."

He said that most clients understand now that the changes will result in better service, and the price increase reflects a reasonable increase due to the costs associated with the provision of the service. "If you take the price increase, we have, we're still cheaper than almost everyone out there in any way," he said.

The servers will be moved March 30, 2014 with a time of 9 h HE planned March 30 to March 31 at 09.

David Hamilton (14 posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other media. It covers the accommodation industry at the international level since the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and industry issues. David is a graduate of the Queen the University and Humber College School of Media Studies.

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