Author Archive for Kevin Van Mondfrans

Up and to the Right: Layered Tech advances in Gartner Magic Quadrant

Published on May 15, 2013 in Cloud Computing, Compliant Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, FISMA Compliance, HIPAA Compliance, Hosting Industry, Industry Expert, Layered Technologies and PCI Compliance. 0 Comments
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

Gartner recently published the 2013 edition of the Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting which included Layered Tech. Since our first inclusion in 2010, Layered Tech has significantly increased our ranking and position with respect to completeness of vision and ability to execute. We have consistently moved up and to the right.

To be considered for the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, providers must deliver on-demand, enterprise-class managed hosting services, have a presence in multiple North American metropolitan areas, and be among the top 15 North American providers by market share. Gartner’s quadrant-based categories rate providers by “vision” – the ability to anticipate and meet customer needs – and by service-delivery excellence, based on customers’ experiences.

I have worked closely with Gartner over the past few years to help them gain deeper insight to our business, our clients, the workloads we serve and our significant differentiators. I have introduced Gartner to many of our staff and clients, to help them understand our unique abilities. As a result, the latest Gartner ratings show rapid ascension for Layered Tech along both the vision scale and the service-execution scale.

Simplifying Complexity and Reducing Risk

As one of the more focused and intimate managed hosting service providers in the Magic Quadrant, Layered Tech is recognized for its ability to manage complex hosting needs with stringent security and compliance requirements, as demonstrated with our strong SLA and compliance guarantee. Managing complex web applications and helping to achieve and maintain security or compliance objectives is a key focus of the Layered Tech business. Our ability to help clients reduce the risk to security threats and to completely achieve compliance with respect to the IT controls is a significant differentiator.

Gartner also recognized our strength and commitment to automate service delivery and change within the ITIL-based change-management framework. This is core to our ability to deliver a high quality of service to our clients. The Layered Tech automated workflow introduces check points to mitigate change risks, automates operations and improves communications.

Compliance Expertise Recognized

Last year’s Gartner report noted that Layered Tech is one of the only providers capable of delivering comprehensive PCI and HIPAA-compliant hosting services for the electronic payment and healthcare markets. This year’s report cites Layered Tech’s expansion into the federal government FISMA compliance market as a new company strength. I would add that we also perform extremely well with SaaS/ISVs, eCommerce and Media.

We think Gartner has done a great job of highlighting some critical strengths and key target markets for Layered Tech. We will continue to drive upward momentum as we work to find new ways to serve customers and anticipate their cloud hosting and compliance needs.

About the Author: As Vice President of Product Management at Layered Tech, Kevin Van Mondfrans (@VANMONDFRANS | +Kevin Van Mondfrans) is responsible for driving the Layered Tech portfolio of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and managed service offerings. With more than 20 years of experience product development and marketing, Kevin has been delivering innovative computing, storage, cloud and service offering with companies such as HP, Dell, and Savvis.

GigaOM Tags Layered Tech for 3 of Top 5 Fastest Cloud Data Centers

Published on May 2, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

GigaOM, a leading technology news site, recently recognized Layered Tech for leading the big dogs of cloud computing in efficiency and speed. The GigaOM article highlighted Layered Tech’s superior cloud computing performance from our Chicago, Kansas City and Dallas data centers, based on Compuware/CloudSleuth’s Global Provider View. In fact, Layered Tech claimed three of the top five spots among more than 40 US-based cloud data centers competing for this honor of superior performance.

Our goal with the Layered Tech eBusiness Cloud Data Center is to offer our customers a platform well suited to running critical business transactions. Our customer’s application performance, availability and security are all critical factors. We have strived to excel in each of these areas and are happy to see our performance validated through services like CloudSleuth and GigaOM.

Data Protection – Not Always a Slam Dunk

Published on April 4, 2013 in Layered Technologies and Security. 0 Comments
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

It’s March Madness time, one of my favorite times of year. Maybe it’s playing college basketball brackets with friends and co-workers that has me thinking of infrastructure strategy in basketball terms. But anyway, it occurs to me that while backup and recovery isn’t sexy, it is critical — and not always a slam dunk.

In fact, dealing with backup windows, complex file systems, data encryption and compliance issues, and planning the solution to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives — well, doing all that is anything but a layup. In fact managing this area continually can really take you out of the game and away from what drives your business.

The ideal data protection backup and recovery service is something that’s worth defining. Here are the capabilities I think every business or enterprise should look for:

Backup service that is quick and reliable with minimal impact to client applications
Rapid recovery of files and entire systems, locally or to systems in an alternate datacenter, to minimize downtime or disruption
Secure transfer and storage of the backup data with strong encryption
Above all, real confidence in the people and platform protecting your data in the event of human error, malicious attack, system failures, or natural disaster

We recently refreshed our backup and recovery platform to offer faster backups, quicker recoveries, and options for offsite storage and recovery in a secure and compliant framework. Our objective is to make backup and recovery something you don’t think much about (unless you actually don’t have backups in place).

Peace of mind is a good thing. It’s also true that backup and recovery service of this caliber is vital in many cases:

When you need a scalable, usage-based model without any need to procure or manage a dedicated system, or provision excess capacity. For an expanding company it means that your system can grow as much as you need, cost-effectively.
To accommodate both file and system restores so you can recover from a variety of potential issues including system error, human error, malicious attack, or outage.
To accommodate clustered systems so you can back up your most complex environments with ease.
When you need to be prepared for both local and off-site recovery. We help you defend all your zones: you can make a quick file recovery to the local system, recover files and systems to off-site resources, or in a rare event like Hurricane Sandy, you can recover to an alternate site.
For quick cold-site recovery. Clients can replicate their backup data to another Layered Tech data center so they have the option to recover either to standby systems or to on-demand cloud resources. The Layered Tech eBusiness Cloud Data Center Service and eBusiness Data Protect Service give you a low-cost way to be disaster tolerant.
When you must provide an environment that is secure and aligned to compliance requirements. In such a situation, another copy of sensitive data may not be a good idea unless you know your data is secure! Our strong data encryption, robust access controls, and change management let you ensure that your data is secure and managed for compliance.

Here’s a data protection game plan: One, backup and recovery is not sexy but it is essential. Two, when selecting your service provider you need to choose one that provides the recovery scenarios (speed of recovery, recovery location, retention, security) your business requires. Three, the best offense is a strong defense.

We have your defense covered so you can get back to playing offense and driving your business without worrying if your data is protected.

Image Credit: Creative Commons

5 Questions to Ask Your Cloud Service Provider

Published on November 7, 2012 in Cloud Computing. Closed
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

Quite often, cloud service providers neglect to make security and compliance of their cloud environments their responsibility. Many service providers leave it to the client to manage their own security. This is not ideal. The client cannot control all elements of the environment and is at a disadvantage. It is startling to me, that 69% of cloud service providers do not believe that security is their responsibility, and even more, do not offer easy to implement security controls as a service according to the Ponemon Institute in 2011.

Why should you care?

Cost of a data breach is $214/record. This adds up when multiplied by thousands of records.
Cost of non-compliance is 2.65 times higher than the cost of compliance.
In 2011, 22.9 million records were exposed as a result of hacking, and 81% of those records included social security numbers.¹

Given that a data breach can be costly or even devastating to a business we believe there are 5 questions you need to ask your service provider. I walk through these questions in my video blog.

Compliance in the Cloud: 5 Questions to Ask Your Service Provider

[1] 2011 Breach List, Identity Theft Resource Center

Photo credit: Primus Pares

Mixing Clients in the Cloud

Published on October 17, 2012 in Cloud Computing, HIPAA Compliance and PCI Compliance. Closed
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

The recently announced Layered Tech Cloud Data Center platform extends our experience in delivering secure and compliance solutions to the cloud, without sacrificing business agility. We have operated secure multi-tenant virtualized platforms for many years including our virtual private server (VPS) platform (since 2007) and our Matrix community cloud (since 2009). Now we offer a completely virtualized cloud data centers environment with optional PCI and HIPAA compliance service and guarantee.

We operate our Cloud Data Center platform in “mixed mode” which means we enable clients with internal or regulatory compliance requirements like PCI-DSS, HIPAA or ISO27001 as well as clients that do not have this requirement. What “mixed mode” means is that we manage the entire environment to meet our highest level of compliance, but enable our customers to select services for each workload based upon their desire for additional preventative services, reporting and audit assistance. Clients do this with a drop down menu selection when ordering their environment or virtual machine. It pretty simple for clients to add and we automate over 200 steps to build that environment in just minutes.

Figure 1: Selecting Compliance Management when configuring your Cloud Data Center.

The benefit of running in a secure cloud platform is a higher degree of isolation between clients and workloads along with greater protection from external and internal threats of a hack or data breach.

What differentiates a compliant cloud platform from other clouds is our ability to ensure that our clients’ environments are isolated, secure, and protected. But it does not stop there; achieving compliance involves a higher degree of planning, management and transparency. Not only do we collect and share data, we analyze the data and proactively involve the client when potential issues are discovered.

The term ‘compliant cloud’ has actually been circulating for some time. Unfortunately, many cloud providers that claim to offer a compliant cloud are just making log data available but requiring that the client do the analysis. Layered Tech actively manages compliance and offers a 100% compliance guarantee to pass every IT audit for PCI DSS compliant hosting or HIPAA/HITECH compliant hosting.

Learn more about compliant clouds by reading our white paper, “Reducing Risk and Increasing Marketability with PCI-Compliant Community Clouds”.