Threats To Business Without A Dependable Server Hosting Company

What defines Dependable Dedicated Server Hosting Company?

Good, reliable, true, honest, safe, secure, steady-going, rock-steady are all synonyms of dependable. Instead of going on and on about what is dependable and how a superlatively dependable hosting company adds value to your business, we give the liberty to you the reader, to grasp the obvious. Let’s better focus on the element of risk which an unreliable hosting agency attracts.

Threats without Dependable Hosting Company

In current times data is being created and consumed everywhere. To give you a perspective 72 hours of YouTube videos gets uploaded every minute. Be it financial transaction, business email, a simple Facebook post, online shopping, every transaction gets recorded and stored, creating data. All this data requires to be secured, let alone misused even losing data to viruses or malwares is unacceptable.

Data integrity and security is under constant risk from outside attempts of theft and also from internal users. Internal users can also willingly compromise data for personal gains. The three fundamental aspects of data security are confidentiality (data privacy, authentication of users), integrity (safekeeping data) and availability (authorized use). Meeting these security standard poses a tough challenge for hosting companies.

Client is connected to server, and the server in turn is connected to the internet, defining the network as depicted in the image below. Data is flowing through these channels. And servers are vulnerable to malware or virus attacks.  

Consider the following Breaches

• A server gets DDoS Distributed Denial of Service attack breaching firewall; nobody including the administrator can access the data on servers.

• A server gets hacked and is then used to send spam emails; the email service provider blocks the particular DNS server. Hence all users including the legitimate ones on this particular server are refrained from sending emails.

These are nightmares to hosting companies but thanks to some hard to breach firewalls keeping such attacks at bay. It is clear that good hosting companies not just host data, they ensure it is secure, accessible and is in safe hands.

What do the threats mean exactly?

Think of a person using a bank locker to keep his valuables safe.  The bank locker room has a number of lockers used by different individuals and the onus lies on banks to secure each one of them. There are pre-defined safety protocols which ensure a user can only access his own locker and not others. This requires the bank in its capacity as a safe-keeper to render best security measures. Will a person use the services of a bank incapable of safeguarding its valuables? I bet the answer would be a big No. Similar is the case with Data Hosted on a Data Center or a Hosting Company’s servers. The above analogy draws comparisons between the roles of Hosting companies to that of a bank. It is imperative that a server hosting services Provider Company should be dependable.

Physical Risk: This is the risk of having stored data at a third party server whose physical whereabouts and security are not in your control. This threat can be mitigated by deploying 24x7 Physical Security, video surveillance, restricted access & biometric access to protect your data.

Failure Risk: This is a business risk. Ideally a server should yield 100% runtime and issues should get resolved in real-time without stopping it.

To overcome this risk, it is crucial to have a team of professionals dedicated to continuously troubleshoot issues.

A dependable server Hosting company meets these requirements, user expectations and achieves excellence through them. It’s not a question of should’s, but it is all about must’s.That’s what being dependable entails.

The success of your business and the kind of user experience you are able to render to your customers, to a great extent, depends on the kind of server hosting company you choose. Select a company based on infrastructure and the kind of Support they are ready to provide in case of downtimes and any contingency.  

Five ways Data Center Park Will Change India

Data Centers are practically power houses. They guard your data, they store and protect your data. The scalability of your website and user experience depend on servers stored in data centers. More and more companies are switching to data centers instead of server hosting companies for more reliability. There are numerous datacenters spread all across the globe and they are all interconnected through the web of internet. To be precise, there are around 20 in India out of which only about 5 are really to say ‘public’ data centers where any type of business can store its data. The rest of them are company specific ones, not meant for outsiders. A data center can host data which is accessible across the globe. But high traffic, low latency at greater distances, low cost region location makes it preferable to have datacenters in proximity to the place where a lot of users reside. For example- A website with a great chunk of user base in France would prefer having datacenter near to or in France. India also needs to be prepared to face the influx of mobile data consumption whose speed mainly relies on the proximity of mobiles to datacenters. 

A majority of companies in India still prefer data center companies abroad. While this may pose a national data security threat in future, it also gives foreign companies a chance to charge exorbitantly. The gap of trust in data centers has been largely due to the lack of data center parks in India. Good news is India’s first Data Center Park is being built in Betma, near Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The Park is spread across a sprawling 100 acres. The government has already proposed to invest Rs 150 Crore into the DCP project. In fact, MP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has welcomed the project with open arms and has called it a ‘dream project’. 

DATA CENTER PARK FACTS

·         The park is spread across 100 acres of land.

·         The state govt. has promised to invest 150 crores in the Data Center Park.

·         DCP is launched with the vision to cater to Cloud Computing Services.

·         Objective is to put India on Global Map.

·         The DCP will bring down data storage costs for Indian IT firms.

This is a big move from the point of view of IT investment. So how exactly would the Data Center Park change India? Here’s how:

1.            Redefining Data Security:  A study conducted by Abror Networks suggests that Distributed denial of service (DDoS)  attacks have increased and become more powerful. Spamphus at 300Gbps was the largest DDoS attack tracked under the study. Security is the one of the topmost concerns for any organization storing data. We have websites in India which have data hosted on Servers located on foreign lands. It is a given that all necessary precautions like firewall safety must be in place to check attempts of hacking into servers. In the age of political snooping, there is still a chance that Nations might use sensitive data against each other. In cloud computing,  location of data is crucial as data stored in a foreign country is subject to the law of that country when it comes to litigation of any kind. Thus, as a necessary precaution it is better to store data within the country rather than depending upon foreign locations. India thus finally has an answer to security concerns in the form of a Data Center Parks where requisite infrastructure would encourage Indian companies to open their own data centers, so that India’s data would remain in India. A data center park in India – the world’s second largest populated country and one of the biggest economies – will certain redefine data security standards worldwide.

2.            Goldmine of Jobs: Opening a Data Center Park in our homeland will undoubtedly create a plethora of jobs. India needs to ‘Make in India’; having its own Data Center Park will boost economic growth, contributing significantly to ITES sector. In isolation a datacenter park might just look like any other business providing a handful of jobs but when looked in terms of a facilitator for other business to run, it has huge impact. From research and development to sales and marketing, a data center is the physical incarnation to whatever happens on digital platform.

3.            Proliferating Technology Start-ups: Projections state that at current pace the number of start-up is expected to be 11,500 by 2020. (Source Nasscom) The availability of Data centers inside the Data Center Park will open lot many allied IT enabled services to be viable for small and mid-sized businesses. Opportunities will be in forefront in terms of new product innovation as the supply will drive demand. Add to that the fact by 2017, the percentage of workloads migrating to cloud will increase by 500%.  This will also ensure Software as a Service (SaaS) industry to entrench its roots deeper with increased penetration driven by better IT infrastructure available at home. India shall become a hub of these services as soon as the Data Center Park is completed. Cloud would become the next big thing in India.

4.            A whole new competitive pricing: Study conducted by Equinix quizzed 441 Tech Managers and found that 34% find Data Centers Costly. There is a thus huge gap between expectations and data storage solutions available worldwide. The industry is maturing towards wanting affordable data storage solution. India currently has 3100 Tech Start-ups of which about 800 have come into existence in 2014. India needs strong infrastructure to support such an ecosystem. Economies of scale, economies of scope and maturity of IT industry supported by favorable government policies will lower the costs for tech start-ups over a period of time. Also, free market ascertains that the end user is destined to benefit as competition increases. Take for instance a home grown ecommerce website; basically a Startup which has grown multiple folds thus now has increased data needs. With the presence of local datacenters the cost of storing data would be a fraction of what it would have paid for storing data at foreign server destinations. Low costs will shape the future of Indian IT industry. The Data Center Park would provide the requisite infrastructure for hosting several data centers. More competition would mean competitive pricing. 

5.            India as not only IT Outsourcing Hub but IT infrastructure hub:By 2020, at least 80% of IT industry growth would be driven by cloud and modern IT Solutions; predicts Nasscom on the emergence of Cloud computing. Moreover, migration to cloud storage has been increasing at an extremely fast pace. Presently, India is considered the land of 3 million IT professionals.  Most of it is involved in serving offshore clients. Sooner or later, almost every IT company would switch to cloud. A strong IT infrastructure will give rise to India as not only IT outsourcing hub but also IT infrastructure hub. Affordable, home grown datacenters with world class architecture to support every possible data storage need will attract foreign companies looking for data storage needs. 

For more detail you can visit these blog:

http://www.arbornetworks.com/corporate/blog/4855-q1-key-findings-from-atlas

http://www.nasscom.in/tech-startups-india-bright-future