Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, James Thompson, Solution Architect at Liquid Web, discusses the ways support plays an important role in developing an overall security strategy for your customers with Intelisys’ SVP Cloud Transformation Andrew Pryfogle. Visit Cloud Services University to learn more about security solutions: http://cloudservicesuniversity.com/
| Andrew: | Hey guys. Time for another Ask the Experts session. Here with James Thompson, Solution Architect with Liquid Web, one of our go-to suppliers for web application hosting out of Michigan. James, welcome back to the studio, man. |
| James: | Thanks. Thanks for having me. |
| Andrew: | Very cool. Hey, I wanted to talk about … We have this kind of recurring theme that keeps coming up in this whole certification track around the people aspect–the support aspect–of a security strategy. It’s not just a box, an appliance, a software configuration. It’s oftentimes the people behind it that make this strategy work. |
| One of the things that Liquid Web is known for is what you guys affectionately call Heroic Support–7 by 24 hour support where I can get to an engineer. I want to talk to you about why do you think that’s important, or can play a really important role, in developing an overall security strategy for a business? Talk about that. | |
| James: | Yeah. It’s just huge to have people available anytime you need it. Hypothetically, let’s say your site was compromised somehow. With that, we can actually start proactively plugging the hole, restoring your site. A lot of people have backups that run nightly. The quicker we get to that, the quicker we can restore a good backup. |
| Andrew: | And so hackers don’t necessarily work an eight to five schedule, right? |
| James: | No. Usually it’s opposite. You know? You’ll see the spam start going out in the middle of the night. |
| Andrew: | Yeah. Interesting. And so what are the things that your people are watching for? Is there monitoring, and looking at reports and alarms, and … What are they watching? What are they eyeballing on behalf of our customers? |
| James: | Yeah. The big thing is we’re going to monitor all standard services on your server. If you get in an influx or DDoS attack, your web server is going to go down. We’re going to see that immediately; try and figure out what’s going on. If we see the influx of traffic, our networking team can handle that because they’re here 24 by 7 also. |
| Andrew: | So some of the sites that you’re hosting–the web apps that you’re hosting–get a ton of traffic, right? I’ve got to imagine, especially the e-commerce sites. This isn’t just about being down. This is about the money engine of the business being shut off. |
| James: | Yeah. Yeah, we have a lot of sites, especially last week with Black Friday. |
| Andrew: | Sure. |
| James: | It was huge. You could see the traffic spikes. The main thing is to keep them online and make sure their servers are responding. Security-wise, we like to make sure they have their web application firewall, their hardware firewall, limited access to the database servers. Just everything locked down nice and tight. |
| Andrew: | In scalable systems, the idea of us hosting our own websites ourselves in our own data center for example–that’s long gone, isn’t it? The scalability that you can give us for bandwidth and for spikes in traffic can make all the difference. For sure. |
| James: | Yeah. We can even scale your application. You can add web nodes in as little as five minutes. It’s huge. |
| Andrew: | Well guys, there you go again. Another example of how the support side, the talent, the expertise side of the equation is such a critical part of an overall security solution. James, thanks for jumping in, man. |
| James: | Thank you. |
| Andrew: | Good deal. Guys, that’s James Thompson. He’s a Solutions Architect for Liquid Web out of Michigan. Right here, by the way. Right here, if you wanted to know. That’s where they’re at. Very cool. Great to have him jump in. |
| Check out the learning center for Liquid Web. Watch their videos and case studies, their white papers. We actually use them ourselves for both CloudServicesUniversity.com and Intelisys.com. It’s made an enormous difference in the web application performance for this business. It could also for your customers. Good selling. |
