Part 2: Secure hosting and the importance of firewalls

Let's talk about the security issues of offsite hosting. How do you address the proprietary issues involved?
That's a great question, because the real essence of our business model is that we share. There's always the concern that we might be allowing one customer to see a competitor's information. You take a lot of different approaches to that. A good hosting company addresses those concerns for their clients.

In terms of visual security, we never show a customer's name. We don't allow customers to put their actual names on cabinets, or equipment. In addition to that, every time we build a circuit, it's always a private circuit that's separate and distinct from other customers.

So, the real essence is that we share but we also have to make sure there are safeguards in place, so that everything is secure.

What about the firewall structure you operate within the offsite hosting?
Every single company has their own unique firewall infrastructure. We don't share a master firewall. And it is very important to have unique firewalls. Even when considering economic benefits, you could have one person managing multiple firewalls - instead, if you think about it being your own business, of hiring a security engineer who is generally managing one firewall - one person one firewall.

You get more economic benefit by having multiples of the same kind of technology, managed by one engineer. And the engineers are motivated to be in this kind of company because they get to see all kinds of firewalls, and they get to specialize.

Why are firewalls so important to companies, and why are there still companies out there who don't value them?
I would say that firewalls are like insurance, you don't really value having insurance until something happens. Those companies that don't have firewalls and don't really have much of a security infrastructure haven't been hacked into and had their website brought down.

There are three different threats associated with security within a site.

The first one is those people hacking to steal data, either to sell the information to an outside buyer, or to gain access to someone's private life. Traditionally, they say that the biggest threats come from inside your organization, as opposed to outside.

The second real type of threat is associated with defacing information. You can go in and deface the information online.

The third threat is damage by viruses. We had the "I Love You" virus, and it immediately took down our email system. We were able to rebuild it very quickly, and in the succeeding months we've put in place four or five levels of virus scanning before anything comes into our organization.

What a company should do is put in multiple layers of security, all on different types of software and hardware, so that it's difficult to penetrate.

What's a really large company that you guys do web hosting for?
A great example is PlayNet, in Dallas, which essentially does online gaming. These folks do multi-player games and that's an industry that fits really well with us. If you think about it, that industry needs a really quick response, and our solutions can give them that.

Our solutions are built around basic platforms that we can deliver to a customer, and every single customer determines their own policies. The platform always begins with a checkpoint firewall and EMC storage, and then we vary it according to the company's unique needs.

What are the challenges for your company in your market space?
The biggest issue is associated with making sure you have healthy customers, to tell you the truth. We have had to address the loss of customers that were going out of business. The biggest concern I think for everyone is how do we get through this time of downturn and get back to a healthy investment climate.

The real issue that underlies everything is that people see what happens in the public markets, and that ripples back to the VCs that control how startups and early stage companies come to fruition. If you slowly turn off the spigot associated with capital to start-up companies, then those companies by definition must tap other sources for investment.

So you have to make sure that the people you're doing business with are financially viable.

The underlying premise behind our business is that the Internet is never going away. The amount of data traffic is constantly growing and, as long as that continues to grow, companies like ours will always be needed. Despite recent events, the Internet is still long-term a much more efficient way of communicating, and of facilitating commerce.