Security is newsworthy. Recently, the IRS reported as many as 330,000 taxpayer accounts they believe were accessed by thieves. These security breaches often result in identity theft and the loss of critical corporate data, and can cost your company millions of dollars in unrecoverable expenses.

As a company, you need to be aware of IT security and your need to be protected, and you might be wondering where to start. This post is the first in a multi-part series about the various types of security products available and what they can do for you. These tools can be used to secure anything -- whether it's a home PC or laptop, an enterprise tech stack or even a hosted hybrid cloud solution. The same principles apply everywhere. Initially, we’ll begin with host-based security products.

Host-based security products are those that reside on or help to protect one host, server, or virtual machine. These host-based security products can be used at home or at work. The three fundamental types we’ll discuss here are Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware, firewalls and IDS/IDP.

Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware

Let’s start with Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware products. These products detect and protect against software viruses on your host. These harmful files get to your host through...

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"Data security starts with physical security." Natalie Lehrer underscored that point in her Information Week article called A Guide to Physical Security. She's right. Protection of company personnel, facilities, and data begins with physical security. It's a strategic priority at CenturyLink. The "rubber meets the road" in the management and operation of the facilities. Our data centers earn a M&O Stamp of Approval Certification from the Uptime Institute. Joel Stone is responsible for Global Data Center Operations at CenturyLink. Here's his take on the importance of a data center receiving M&O Certification:

"Earning the M&O certification demonstrates the effectiveness of a data center’s management and operations, giving customers “peace of mind” by ensuring the facility that houses their critical IT functions has passed a rigorous, third-party audit to conform its practices to the highest of standards."

This is Part 1 in a three part series covering various aspect of data center security. Part 2 will discuss environmental protections. Part 3 will cover media protections.

Security Policies

It starts at the top. Physical security at a data center is governed by CenturyLink Corporate Security. This group oversees the policies, processes, and work rules ensuring that all data centers operate under a consistent set of procedures...

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For several years now, the question around the shift to IPv6 has been "When?" NOT "If". As of September 24th 2015, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced it had issued final IPv4 addresses and the free pool for IPv4 addresses had reached “zero.” The time to prepare for your businesses' IPv6 transition is now!

Why Now is the Time to Start Planning

While a majority of the world's devices today are not yet compatible with IPv6, dual-stack technology ensures that legacy IPv4 devices will still work for the foreseeable future. However, soon IPv6 will be the only option for adding new devices or hosts on the Internet. Understanding the background behind IPv4 and the benefits of IPv6 are the first steps in proactive planning.

IPv4

Computers use Internet Protocol (IP) to find one another and permit communication. IP Version 4 (IPv4) was developed in the early 1980s during a much simpler time in Internet evolution. At that time, 4 billion addresses seemed like a huge number! Since then, the number of computers attached to the Internet has multiplied many times over. Plus, our vehicles and many devices in our homes and pockets use network connections. With the growing trend toward the Internet of...

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Improving your business requires changing your business. When dealing with Migration, changes need to be researched per business case and methodically implemented. Stakeholders and leadership are always looking for opportunities rooted in IT and product improvements. Whether these improvements are driven by cost savings or the need for increased capacity, disaster recovery, proximity to customers, or IT/product agility, a diversified data center solution could provide the advantages you are looking for. Over half the market of Enterprise IT decision makers are in the same boat and are researching change that will include a hybrid IT solution by 2017.

To help outline the benefits you might achieve through migration, this article introduces:

• Four basic hosting options
• Hosting option characteristics
• Hosting option selection goals:
  • Converting capital to operating expenses
  • Offloading staff responsibilities
  • Specific operational goals

Data Center Options

The market has responded to customer needs by providing several layers of data center options, offering increased offloading of facility and infrastructure management. Although individual providers have different mixes of features to offer and different ideas about what services to offer at each level, we can divide the space into four general categories.

On-Premises

Company-owned data centers run the gamut of sophistication from a gear closet to a stand-alone data center with dedicated facilities management....

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People generally agree on what the term "Managed Services" means, right? Unfortunately, "Managed Services" is a bit more complicated than a surface-level term. It’s easy to roll a collection of services, products, and tasks under one broad umbrella statement and call it a day. However, the problem is most companies, product owners, IT managers, customers, and engineers have their own version of what a “Managed Service” actually is, as each one’s experiences are unique. Recently, pressure from consumers for clarity around the term and details of Managed Services necessitates exploration in the effort of yielding a more concise explanation.

Welcome to the CenturyLink Cloud, Managed Services.

Bringing Managed Services to the cloud is one of the many facets of the CenturyLink Platform offerings.

Managed Services on CenturyLink Cloud provides experts at the ready to maintain and administer your cloud deployments for optimum performance and value. CenturyLink Cloud provides businesses with the power to instantly create managed environments for their most important applications such as production websites, SQL databases, and directory services. Additionally, managed workloads can be scaled with the same speed and agility people have come to expect from the public cloud.

Brief History of Managed Services

Managed Services started with break-fix. Over time, procedures...

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Traditional IT Disaster Recovery (DR) is both expensive and brittle. Today, however, inexpensive and robust disaster protection is available to all organizations through the emergence of Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), such as that offered by CenturyLink Cloud. The DRaaS market is exploding. In their Global Forecast Report, the research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates that today the DRaaS markets is $1.42BN, and that by 2020 the DRaaS market will be $11.92BN.

Cloud has driven this growth along with new technologies that allow companies to leverage their existing data center while also using the Cloud for DR. Some customers have begun using the Cloud for both their production data center as well as their recovery data center. In both cases, companies have been able to leverage the cloud to meet GRC (Governance, Regulatory and Compliance) requirements.

Today, in a global economy that runs 24x7x365, it is critical to have a DR plan that can be modified and tested as required. Unfortunately, many times these tests fail for one reason or another (e.g., modification to applications that depend on other applications, undocumented processes, issues with encryption keys, etc.). Let’s take a look at six primary benefits of DRaaS:

Key Benefits

1. Cost Savings

• Compute (CPU and Memory) – cost incurred only

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What's so different about how CenturyLink Cloud approaches Customer Care? Well, just about everything.

I sat down with Michael Talbert, the mastermind behind all our Customer Care initiatives, to find out what makes this team so unique and so successful.

"We've approached the idea of supporting our customers from a whole new angle... It's about empathy, taking care of customers and solving problems. It's way more than just technical support."

Lyza Latham: Michael, tell me what’s the big difference in how CenturyLink Cloud approaches Customer Care?

Michael Talbert: One of the things that’s frustrating for customers, particularly technical customers, is having to explain a complex problem to someone who isn’t technical. The traditional industry approach to Technical Support is to initially have the customer speak with a generalist. If the generalist can’t solve the problem, the issue is escalated—sometimes in multiple, painful increments—to more and more technical tiers until eventually the problem is resolved. We take a totally unique approach, with three key differentiators:

• We staff our team with senior service engineers who can handle 90% of issues at the first contact.
• As long as the issue doesn’t require a code change, we should be able to resolve it within that first engagement.
• Our interview and screening process puts the emphasis

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The Terrace Rooftop at the Moonrise Hotel is about to be compromised — and then secured with CenturyLink Cloud encryption. Register and join us as we dive head-first into cloud security, compliance and encryption in a multi-tenant environment. Our partnership with Vormetric, a leader in data security solutions, has created an easily-deployable security solution that translates across platforms and environments and protects data wherever it is stored (even data that isn’t in our cloud). Our main goal is to provide a workshop—a place where people from different backgrounds and companies can come together to learn about security options.

This isn’t a run-of-the-mill presentation and speech; we expect you to earn your drinks and food (there will be plenty). Our Cloud engineers will provide you with a CenturyLink Cloud demo account and an educational license for Vormetric, and then it’s your turn to play (you’ll have to supply the laptop, of course). We will be there to walk you through every step, and we'll even have some cool prizes to hand out at the end of the session.

This workshop doesn’t require you to be a security expert in order to attend. We welcome all kinds of IT pros, novices and everyone in...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Ian Masters, Vice President, Cloud & Strategic Alliances at Vision Solutions

The Cloud DR market is finally maturing. I believe this is confirmed by the release of the first Gartner Magic Quadrant (GMQ) for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). According to the report, the Gartner estimates the size of the DRaaS market to be approximately $1.3 billion, with a related compound annual growth rate of approximately 30%. Impressive, to say the least. Interestingly, the Gartner also states that, “DRaaS vendors initially provided VM recovery primarily for VMware. However, given the rapid growth of other VM types, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Linux-centric KVM, and Oracle VM (OVM), service instances are becoming increasingly heterogeneous.

Unified Solutions Suite

Additionally, the GMQ reports "there is an ever-increasing customer demand for more integrated support of hybrid recovery configurations – that is, recovery configurations containing both virtual and physical servers." Due to this development, it’s easy to see why Service Providers are having to use such a...

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Today, we are proud to highlight the success story of one of our biotech customers, Cytobank. Cytobank is a cloud biopharma service that supports research labs around the world. We spoke to Robin Lee Powell, Director of IT Operations at Cytobank who shared how they leverage Cloud Application Manager to save on infrastructure costs and increase team efficiency.

Cytobank helps researchers study life-threatening diseases such as cancer. Scientists around the globe rely on Cytobank to organize, share, and analyze single-cell cytometry data on a massive scale. Visualizing single-cell data involves loads of data transfer and often heavy computations between the client and the backend. On top of that, each customer site is completely isolated and unique from another. Cytobank not only serves customer labs but also provides demo, development and QA environments for their offshore team to test site changes.

All this complexity requires high capacity resources for many uniquely configured site environments. Since the requirements and resource demands of each site vary uniquely, live usage metrics helps determine when to scale resources up or down. To fulfill the unique demands of customer, demo, and QA site environments, Cytobank leverages Cloud Application Manager as an integrated platform.

Self-Service Catalog to Scale Efficiently

At Cytobank,...

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Back from an exciting week at the Jenkins User Conference in Santa Clara, I want to thank all of you who stopped by the Cloud Application Manager booth to share your thoughts and questions. From the 600+ attendees representing various enterprises, some key themes emerged that reflect their IT organizational challenges and objectives. I’ll go over the top three.

A Desire to Increase Deployment Frequency

Gene Kim, a keynote speaker at the conference rightly, said, “Deploy smaller changes more frequently.” While most enterprises deploy applications in some form or fashion, a huge amount of manual tasks and steps slows down the process. It’s a combination of a process and tools issue.

Confidence in Successful Deployments

Many IT and DevOps teams experience sleepless nights and get on pins-and-needles when it is time to deploy into production. Reducing errors, predictability and stable applications in production are key. As Gene Kim said at the conference, “At the end of each spring, we must have working and shippable code… demonstrated in an environment that resembles production.”

Faster Lead-Time to Deployment

Not only are frequent deployments a good thing, but reducing the overall time of a single deployment is a major IT goal. Deployment orchestration is the next step in driving...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Erica Brescia, from one click application tool Bitnami.

Ever wished you had an easy way to deploy Redmine, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Drupal, or your favorite app in the cloud? Preferably one that didn't involve dealing with complicated server infrastructure, cryptic configuration files and multiple software versions?

Well, now you have one. We're pleased to announce that many of Bitnami's server applications and development environments are now available to CenturyLink Cloud customers as Bitnami Cloud Blueprints. With this integration, you can deploy over 100 Bitnami pre-configured applications quickly and securely on your CenturyLink cloud server...no tweaking necessary!

At Bitnami, we've taken the data we get from our million-plus deployments each month and used it to make sure that launching complex, multi-tiered application environments with our cloud images is as painless as possible.

Here’s how:

• All our applications are pre-compiled and pre-configured with all necessary dependencies so that they work out-of-the-box.
• They’re quick and easy to install; simply sign into your CenturyLink account and select the Bitnami Cloud Blueprint of your

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