Archive for the 'Cloud Computing' Category

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.

Cloudbook Tells Our Story

Published on January 31, 2013 in Cloud Computing. Closed
Posted by Vince Vasquez

Layered Tech recently partnered with Cloudbook to tell our story and we were thrilled with the results. The CEO of Cloudbook, Vince Vasquez, tells us about his vision below.

Two years ago when the first iPad launched, we seized the opportunity to build a new application to help businesses, like Layered Tech, tell their stories. As such, our storytelling software — based on lessons learned from producing films, documentaries and books — allows the consumer to read and watch a story, chapter by chapter via their iPad, iPhone or online. These stories are packaged in what our customers simply call their “Cloudbooks.”

Storytelling is one of the best ways to learn. In addition, research indicates some of us learn better by watching, some by reading and some by listening. Being able to deliver a story in all these ways on a tablet, built for delivering stories, is indeed game changing.

But that’s not all. In the modern world we know it’s important for some people to watch the story on the subway in New York, another on a flight to China and yet another shares the story while in a cafe in Paris. With that in mind, we’ve engineered our application to be deployed on a worldwide basis with all of the security, performance, and availability management features you’d expect of an enterprise application.

In short, Cloudbook has blended the ancient art of storytelling with modern technology, so whether you are selling managed cloud hosting or next generation pharmaceuticals, this is the most complete way to tell your story.

Click to learn what the Layered Tech Cloudbook can do for you!

About the Author: Vince Vasquez is the CEO of Cloudbook and brings over 25 years of experience in high tech positions at companies such as Sun, HP and Cray Research. He has held a wide range of positions, including sales, marketing, business development, software development, and IC manufacturing. Most recently, Vince created and ran Sun’s Software-as-a-Service program, and assisted with business development in Sun’s Cloud efforts, both of which focused on delivering go-to-market success for customers and partners.

Intelligence in the Cloud – Security and Compliance

Published on November 28, 2012 in Cloud Computing and Events. Closed
Posted by Carody Lavender

dcia We hope you can join Layered Tech at the “Intelligence in the Cloud” workshop, which is a unique opportunity to understand the challenges of migrating secure multimedia assets to the cloud. The workshop, jointly sponsored by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), will focus on how military and government agencies with responsibilities for intelligence gathering can safely leverage the benefits of cloud computing.

The day will include a fantastic lineup of panel discussions and case study presenters. Our very own Jeff Reich, Chief Risk Officer, will present a private sector case study at 1:45pm about managing your cloud for security and compliance. Do you need to learn how to adapt existing controls to make real-time cloud compliant? Are you looking to develop a FISMA-compliant cloud solution or find a provider to offer one? You won’t want to miss this discussion.

“Intelligence in the Cloud” will be held Tuesday December 4th at the NAB Headquarters in Washington D.C. from 8:00am – 5:00pm. For more information, you can visit http://www.nabshow.com/2013/iitc/.

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”.