Featuring: David Aviv, Radware’s CTO, and Mark Houpt, DataBank’s CISO.
New attacks are orders of magnitude more significant in terms of volume and capability. It’s a totally different ball game.
CISO Corner Episode 25:
Listen to David Aviv, Radware’s Chief Technology Officer as he describes the expanding attack surface for DDoS. For network DDoS, the most important parameter was false positives. For Web DDoS, it’s false negatives. This is a significant development.
Run Time: 6 minutes
DataBank’s CISO Corner is for CISOs and security practitioners, where we discuss a variety of cybersecurity topics and current events from the CISO’s perspective. Our broadcast is designed for those who want to hear from security and compliance experts on the front lines.
Expanded Compute Resources & Enhanced Connectivity to Drive Data Science Initiatives
Salt Lake City’s tech boom calls for greater compute capacity and enhanced connectivity to drive data science initiatives, and a key player in the technology ecosystem is the DataBank SLC1 data center. Located in the heart of downtown, SLC1 features easy access to the city’s business district.
The data center operates within the primary carrier hotel for the Salt Lake City area—populated with multiple Tier-1 and Tier-2 network providers entering the building through multiple access points. As a data center within a carrier hotel, SLC1 delivers five key benefits to DataBank customers:
Fast Delivery: Quick installation intervals that speed time-to-market for new services
Carrier Selection: A diverse range of telecommunications service providers
Low-Latency Performance: Direct access to carrier backbones
Arbitrage Costs: Competition among carriers drives down customer connectivity pricing
Scalability: Flexibility to select carriers without physically moving equipment to another data center
The carrier hotel was built in 1957 and is located one block from the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Building. The Salt Palace Convention Center is also nearby, and the Salt Lake City International Airport is just eight miles away.
SCL1 – 179 Social Hall Avenue, Salt Lake City
SLC1 serves multiple Internet Exchanges along with many peering participants, Internet service providers, and carriers. As with all carrier hotels, SLC1 connects to extensive fiber paths as well as multiple points of entryway and the numerous networks residing in these locations.
Twenty one carriers connect directly into the SLC1 network—including Zayo, AT&T, Comcast, and Lumen—while Packet Fabric (Unitas Global) provides SLC1 with a direct cloud on-ramp. Other accessible cloud on-ramps include Megaport, which is reachable via interconnect services, and Console Connect, an extended location in the carrier hotel that’s just a local loop away.
For interconnection services, peering occurs directly within SLC1 via the Salt Lake Internet Exchange and Mountain West Internet Exchange. With multiple points of entryway, carriers can also easily reach their outside plant fiber cables, ensuring fast delivery and performance.
To tether to other data centers, DataBank offers colocation services within Suite 200 at the carrier hotel, with extensive interconnectivity to the DataBank Granite Point Campus between Salt Lake City and Utah’s Silicon Slopes—where five DataBank data centers operate. Customers within SLC1 can link to each other through cross-connects, and SLC1 offers 1G MPLS and 10G WAVE connectivity to 10 DataBank data centers in Dallas, Kansas City, and Minneapolis as well as Ashburn, Virginia.
A Go-To Data Center Destination for Innovators
Praised by Forbes as the “Best State for Business” and “Least Debt Burdened,” Utah makes for easy accessibility to the West Coast and Rocky Mountain communities. Recognizing this trend many carriers and Internet Service Providers, which comprise the majority of the 81 customers within SLC1, have turned to DataBank’s data center resources. As these customers demonstrate, the Utah region is a go-to data center destination, not only for local Silicon Slopes innovators but also for those seeking an alternative to expensive data centers in California.
Look for SLC1 and other carrier hotels in DataBank’s portfolio of data centers on the interactive map on this website’s home page. You can also check below for related resources.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based approach to business continuity that replicates your critical IT systems and data to a provider’s infrastructure, enabling rapid failover and restoration when a primary system goes down, whether due to ransomware, hardware failure, natural disaster, or human error. Unlike traditional disaster recovery, which required organizations to maintain duplicate physical hardware at a secondary site (expensive, complex, and rarely tested), DRaaS delivers recovery capability on a subscription basis with dramatically lower upfront cost and far more flexibility. The core business case for DRaaS among US organizations comes down to three factors: Recovery Time Objective (RTO: how fast systems are restored), Recovery Point Objective (RPO: how much data is lost), and total cost of ownership compared to traditional DR infrastructure. Leading DRaaS providers deliver sub-hour RTOs and near-zero RPOs for mission-critical workloads at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a warm standby data center. DRaaS is particularly well-suited for organizations that lack dedicated DR expertise, operate in geographies prone to natural disasters, or face compliance requirements mandating documented, tested recovery plans. For any US business whose revenue depends on IT availability, DRaaS transforms disaster recovery from a rarely-tested insurance policy into a continuously verified, operationally mature capability.
Companies face so much risk today from a wide and growing number of threats: cyberattacks, power outages, natural disasters, or other types of situations that can lead to downtime and require rapid recovery.
In turn, each of these threatens business continuity, which can lead to real consequences, including:
Lost revenues
Loss of customer trust
Reputational damage
Missed business opportunities
Surprisingly high costs related to recovery
Potential fines, penalties, and lawsuits
At this point, cybersecurity attacks and outages are happening at such an alarming rate that most organizations would be wise to consider any disruption to their operations to be an inevitable, “when” event, not an “if.”
Unfortunately, a high number of companies may not be prepared. According to recent research from IDC Research, 93% of all organizations have suffered a data-related business disruption in the last 12 months. Yet only 29% of the surveyed IT and business leaders in those companies expressed complete confidence in their current disaster recovery technology to recover their data.
The Challenges Posed by Traditional Recovery Tools
Why is this? Again, there’s a gap between what companies think they have for their disaster recovery solution and what they have in terms of ownership, daily use, and overall efficacy. In short, many organizations face one or more of these limitations:
High cost of ownership
The need for specialized IT or cybersecurity skills
Lack of scalability
Lengthy recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO)
Missing or limited communication plans
Compliance risks
These challenges and limitations signal that the time is right for companies to move beyond old ways of thinking about disaster recovery and begin to consider next-generation innovations and managed services approaches that are already proving to be more effective at protecting them from any adverse event.
The Benefits of Disaster Recovery
It is important to emphasize that even the most redundant systems can’t offer 100% protection. Each system represents a single point of failure in the overall architecture. If an entire system goes down, it could trigger a chain of events that threaten business continuity and can’t be overcome, even with multiple redundancies.
For example, a redundant storage system with highly available controllers and other elements could still completely fail due to a software bug. This makes it critical to have a disaster recovery solution, even for the most highly available applications and systems.
Disaster recovery solutions help companies restore data and resume operations in the shortest time possible after disaster strikes. Disaster recovery solutions encompass comprehensive backup strategies, redundant systems, and failover mechanisms that allow for a seamless transition to backup systems in the event of system failures, cyberattacks, or natural disasters.
By minimizing downtime and data loss, disaster recovery solutions enable businesses to continue serving customers, managing operations, and maintaining productivity even during challenging circumstances. This continuity helps prevent revenue loss, preserves customer trust, and upholds the company’s reputation as a reliable partner committed to data security and customer trust, even in the face of adversity.
Why You Should Consider Disaster Recovery as a Service
As the acronym implies, DRaaS is a service, not a product. While your solution will surely involve industry-leading hardware and software platforms, the keys to successful outcomes center around the experience, expertise, and service components of your provider.
To help you achieve your RTO and RPO objectives now, and for years to come, it is advisable to seek partners and service-based solutions, so you don’t have to worry about internal staffing or re-evaluating the underlying hardware and software platforms as your needs change.
For example, with DataBank’s disaster recovery service, part of our larger Managed Services offering, there’s no need for overburdened technical resources to set up and manage a duplicate production system in a secondary data center or attempt to rely on backups at an offsite location. DataBank owns all of the components of the disaster recovery platform and employs the engineering expertise, so implementation, migration, and support are all performed in-house.
We offer one other important differentiator: our consultative process for helping you navigate from where you are to where you need to be. A wide range of organizations – of all types and sizes – already leverage DataBank’s experience, expertise, migration assistance, and personalized services to achieve the outcomes they need to protect their business.
Next-generation disaster recovery solutions – such as a modern DRaaS offering delivered by a capable managed service provider – is a proven way to overcome common limitations and subsequent business failures. Implementing such an approach can give any organization a better way to improve cybersecurity resilience, prevent downtime, and keep their business up and running at all times.
For specific guidance on how you can develop a disaster recovery strategy that’s right for your organization, download our Disaster Recovery Planning Checklist today.
If you would like to discuss your business initiatives or have technical questions about how our service works, please Contact Us,
