Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

I’m pleased to announce that Clearpath has received SSAE 16 Type 2 SOC 1 reports documenting the suitability of design and effectiveness of our controls to achieve related control objectives.  The reports cover a broad range of financial auditing requirements for U.S. and International auditing bodies.

Yesterday, most (if not all) Nirvanix customers received letters stating that the company is ceasing operations on September 30, 2013. Clients were notified that they have until that time to remove data from the Nirvanix cloud platform. After that time the data will be inaccessible.

Many of you know that Clearpath partnered with Amazon Web Services starting in early 2013. We did this because our customers were already using the AWS platform, asking us for integration assistance, and pushing the envelope of hybrid cloud. Prior to our partnership with AWS, Clearpath delivered managed cloud services through our managed services division, Clearpath hosting. Clearpath hosting - a sister company to Clearpath Solutions Group, was founded in 2008 and originally launched as a private cloud computing service provider, with bolt on managed services for clients hosted in our cloud. In June 2013, Clearpath hosting was renamed to Clearpath Cloud Services (CCS), a division of Clearpath. CCS now provides managed services on the Amazon Web Services platform as well as our own private label VMware vCloud environment. We also deliver comprehensive managed services through our Clearpath Select platform – which is run out of CCS.

For the past six years, Clearpath has served the DC and Baltimore metropolitan areas, delivering infrastructure solutions focused on virtualization, data protection and other data center infrastructure technologies.  In 2008 we formalized our virtualization practice and helped many of our clients convert legacy applications from physical to virtual, enabling the first step on the way to the cloud.

In Part 1, we discussed the strategy of moving your office or data center, focusing on how to determine your requirements based on the tolerable downtime during your move.

In part one of this series, I’m going to discuss the strategy of the move.  Specifically how to determine your requirements based on the tolerable downtime during your move.

Clearpath’s clients include IT departments, C-level executives and small business owners.  Many of them have deployed tablets, most often Apple’s iPad, as the result of a user population that is clamoring for the device and its form factor and innovative interface.  Often my clients will ask me, “How should I go about managing the security risks that the iPad or iPhone add to our corporate security?”  Since we at Clearpath host a number of our customers’ critical application infrastructures, including email, virtual desktop and proprietary applications, we have a good deal of experience helping our customers do just this.  We deploy several applications in our cloud infrastructure that help to control the Apple iOS devices that our clients use.  Many of our clients don’t have these capabilities, so I’ve put together a list of things that can be done which will ensure that you are protecting data as well as possible in small deployments.