Category "Cloud Solutions"

Protect your organization: Network infrastructure devices such as routers and switches may seem relatively secure however, there are many “hidden” security vulnerabilities that attackers can leverage to control your organization’s entire network if not identified and resolved.

For example, a large portion of the known router vulnerabilities involve remote administration services such as Telnet, SSH, TFTP, and HTTP. Of the three mentioned above, only SSH offers encrypted connections, while the others enable an attacker with a sniffer to capture information in the clear, and HTTP and Telnet enable the attacker to view user names and passwords sent over the network as well. The obvious solution to this type of attack is to only use services that enable high level  encryption with algorithms that meet standards such as those in the U.S. Federal Government’s FIPS 140-2 documentation. So with routers, enabling only SSH and/or HTTPS while disabling all other services unless necessary and only for a specific activity before disabling again (such as TFTP used for updating firmware) is essential to ensuring that routers are not susceptible to sniffing attacks.

Another attack that also involves remote administration services is CSRF or Cross Site Request Forgery. What happens in this attack is that someone logs in to a router then leaves the session open (does not close the session) when finished working with the router. The router is susceptible to accepting commands from unauthorized persons if the session is not closed after use. To prevent CSRF attacks, configure routers (if supported) with a timeout on remote administration sessions (such as 2 to 5 minutes) when there is no activity detected. IPS/IDS systems and firewalls with CSRF prevention features detect and mitigate or alert administrators to an attack when configured to do so by inspecting HTTP header referer and cookie fields.

If your organization’s network needs a security check up, contact us to learn how our managed security services can identify and correct vulnerable configurations and maintain a high level security posture for your network and organization.

In the next post, SQL injection attack techniques and what you can do to protect your organization and valuable information from SQL injection vulnerabilities.

A business continuity plan ensures business critical resource availability and systems necessary for organization survival and success. Fault tolerance, high availability and redundancy are system attributes essential to a successful business continuity plan. Understand the fault tolerance, redundancy, and high availability types required by the organization, defined by your business continuity plan, and supported by each system before procurement and deployment.

Fault tolerance refers to systems, software or networks designed to resist failure when an adverse event such as network connection outage or hard drive failure occurs. Fault tolerance is an asset attribute or property highly desirable for disaster recovery and business continuity planning. For example, storage systems configured with JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) volumes will likely lose all data when a single drive in the array fails. However, storage systems configured in a RAID 6 array rather than a JBOD volume possess a fault tolerant feature (property) that enables them to lose up to two disks without losing either the entire disk array or any data.

The purpose behind fault tolerant features is “high-availability”. High-availability refers to the descriptive measurement of system up-time in relation to the service provided. For example, a single web server provides little in the way of fault tolerance if it were to fail and go offline due to a power outage or DoS attack. However, a group of three web servers configured as a cluster and each powered from a different power grid and running RAID 6 storage arrays provide a high degree of fault tolerance as a system. Each web server is susceptible to power outage, however the system as a whole is still capable of serving HTTP requests should one or two of the web servers fail due to power outage. To the user accessing the web pages the system would be considered “highly available” because it appears as if the web pages are always online. To the web server administrator the system would be “highly fault tolerant” because it is capable of handling up to two separate power outages (able to tolerate a large number of faults) in two separate grids while still remaining available.

Redundancy describes a type of fault tolerance that helps deliver high-availability. Redundancy applies to both disaster recovery and business continuity planning because the redundancy countermeasures mitigate risk identified during business continuity planning if both applicable to the system and justifiable through cost analysis. Redundancy is a disaster recovery component because it’s used to make a system more fault tolerant (a property of a system), delivering high-availability (the goal of both fault tolerance and a business continuity plan) by providing a recovery path in the form of standby, clustered (such as mentioned earlier) or other fail-over technique that ensures recovery when an incident occurs.

Contact us for more information about how fault tolerant, highly available, and redundant systems can ensure the business continuity of your organization.

Any business owner that works with cloud hosting knows the importance of cloud security. That is why we here at Whoa take your security seriously with our multi-layered cloud security. The cloud security that we provide comes in 7 different layers. We have outlined the different layers below to demonstrate to you the kind of peace of mind that we provide our customers.

Layer 1: Physical Security- This layer of security seeks to ensure that the physical access to the data centers that we partner with is sufficiently protected. We ensure this by only doing business with data centers that are Tier IV because of the strict security policies that these data centers have in place. This provides the peace of mind that there is never any unauthorized access to your data.

Layer 2: Network Protection- As the name suggests, this layer of security controls traffic coming in and out of the network. It also provides firewall protection through antivirus, intrusion and application protection, data filtering and malware protection.

Layer 3: Secure Multitenant Architecture- This layer of security provides protection by isolating customer workloads by use of VLAN, VXLAN, and SAN vServer segmentation.

Layer 4: Per-Tenant Firewalls- This ensures that each cloud tenant is protected by an individual firewall. This provides personal security for each individual user and protects from the various threats that are found on the internet.

Layer 5: Host-Based Firewalls- We want all of our clients to be protected by utilizing firewalls built into the operating system. The purpose of this layer of security is two-fold: to protect against threats that might breach the perimeter and protect against threats from the inside.

Layer 6: Antivirus- This layer protects by scanning your system for both inside and outside attacks. We offer this managed service so that you don’t have to worry about it.

Layer 7: Backup and Replication- We protect your data by automatically replicating it to a different geography. This is meant to ensure you that your data is protected against physical and environmental threats.

Here at Whoa, we take your security seriously. If you have any questions about our 7 layers of security, please contact us.

Having access to great products and services is simple, and anyone can do it, but does your IT service provider take the steps needed to become a trusted partner? That’s why we believe that having a “customer first” philosophy in business relationships helps to build trust

We believe that customers should always come first; it sounds cliché, but it is a necessary mantra in the field of IT consulting and services. We’ve all experienced the feeling of being kept out of the loop when it comes to servicing pieces of technology, and can agree that the feeling is not pleasant. However, not all experiences are created equal, and there are still professionals who prefer to go the extra mile.

Having A “Customer First” Philosophy Helps Builds Trust

You know your business like no one else, and you need to focus your time and resources on growing it. No company you hire will be an expert in what YOU do. That is why it is vitally important that real working relationships be built with trust and understanding. We believe that if we learn about your needs and become your trusted partner, we can build something special. It is our responsibility to listen, as well as communicate, effectively, so that our collective teams stay on the same page at all times, and work to bring your brand more success.

We put our customers first, and aim to provide top-notch support at all levels, within the scope of all projects that we manage. Our products and services are excellent, and we aim to prove our worth to your business through quantifiable actions.

Contact us when you’re ready to discuss any needs you currently have.