Introduction

Your clients want their digital platform hosted securely, quickly and at low cost on a high performing infrastructure. That means you’re relying on your development teams to step out of their core skillset to use their time and your opportunity cost and run the various platforms and respond to issues. They are also responsible for ensuring that the platforms are secure and responding to security risks and notifications, along with downtime issues 24/7/365.

We are experts across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and our own UK hosted highly available hosting platform. We run WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Moodle platforms for many clients along with bespoke application deployments in many development languages. Bespoke documented systems including Kubernetes, Node.js, auto-scaling server pools, serverless database engines including MySQL, NoSQL, MS-SQL Server, deployment pipelines and automation all tuned to how your application needs.

Companies are much more security and downtime focused and aware so will want to know how those risks are covered. By using an experienced managed hosting partner to take on those risks you expand your agencies capabilities with no capital expenditure. You leverage their experience, procedures, systems and staff to ensure that projects hit the ground running, are stable and cost efficient.

We go one step further than that and work closely with our clients to become in effect an extension of their in-house team, providing a service that’s flexible, personal and tailored to their exact specifications.

The five key risk areas to look at are Reputation, Cost, Security, Performance and Compliance.

Reputation

If the sheer commercial cost of putting right a security breach wasn’t enough, intimately linked to security and compliance risk is the enormous damage done to brand reputation when such events occur. With brand trust so easily cancelled in todays social media world, firms simply cannot afford to drop the ball, given the severity of the potential repercussions to their business.

Just a single event involving data loss or theft can seriously jeopardise the ‘trust equity’ that has been built up over decades. Comparatively a major breach can all too easily bring down even the seemingly most robust of firms. While it may be tempting to play down any issue that has occurred, this often just exacerbates the
situation, given the instantaneous and intense media scrutiny that can be expected to accompany any data loss event. Worse still, PwC cites that in 10% of all cases, the first a company knows about a data breach is when it is reported in the media.

The ensuing bad publicity is much more than just an embarrassment. As reported by IBM in a Cost of Data Breach Study, independent research organisation Ponemon found that 31% of those they surveyed terminated their relationship with an organisation once they knew there had been a data security breach. This has an immediate consequence for revenue, with the threat of potential legal action to recover any losses continuing to hang over the business for years to come. It’s a sobering thought that less than half of all data breaches are spotted within one day of them occurring.

This simply highlights the importance of having a managed hosting company on your side to act as your ‘eyes and ears’, especially when just 27% of these security events are detected through routine security monitoring. We implement a Security Operations Centre service as standard actively monitoring and reporting on issues and security alerts on systems, including user creation, permissions changes, critical file updates and much more.

Cost

Cost is always a critical concern to any business and there are several tools that can be leveraged to make sure that costs are known and understood throughout the lifecycle of a platform. Especially on Public Cloud platforms tend to be set up and deployed in a hurry to meeting project deadlines and then left to run without circling back to be right sized and cost checked. This leads to cloud sprawl which is a proliferation of cloud resources within a platform or organistaion with little wider understanding of what is critical to the platform. . These rogue cloud resources lead to wasteful expenditures, security vulnerabilities and management complications.

Cloud sprawl is an ongoing challenge requiring constant vigilance and proactive management. With the costs of cloud sprawl issues potentially heading north all too quickly, it makes sense to regularly audit, check and evaluate the costs, security and efficiency of your cloud services infrastructure.

This is where bringing in specialist expertise and dedicated resources of a managed cloud services partner benefits busy CTOs with limited resources trying to manage on shrinking budgets. Our team has a wealth of experience of working with organisations from different industry sectors, so from the outset they know what to do, what tools to use and how to architect an efficient platform, helping you to save money on wasted resources from day one. 

Security

Security of data and services is now one of the greatest priorities for any firm across all sectors. A rapidly changing security landscape can render organisations without specialist knowledge vulnerable to breaches from random attacks, but also from an ever-growing number of concerted, coordinated and relentless campaigns, carried out with malicious or criminal intent.

The growing incidence of cyber attacks and data breaches brings into stark relief the monumental importance for all companies to protect themselves against security breaches. Repelling such attacks has now become an ongoing cost that has to be managed on a constant basis, because when they succeed, these attacks come at such a high financial cost that many companies are unable to survive them, whether that be GDPR fines, data recovery specialists or in sales drop off due to reputational damage.

Given the variance in duration and core costs of any one incident, calculating an accurate average total price tag for security breaches is difficult. However, research by the UK government and consultancy PwC has found that the worst data breach incidents are costing large UK businesses between £1.5m to £3m through lost sales and assets, time spent responding to the incident, and regulatory fines. For small organisations, costs were found to range from £75,200 to £310,800. In the US the US National Cyber Security Alliance, 60% of small businesses cease trading within six months of a successful cyber crime attack.

So, whether you are an e-commerce provider processing millions of financial transactions a week, or a professional services firm storing personal information, it’s crucial that any managed hosting company you select has the capacity to properly protect your data. This means they must have not only staff who are properly security checked, but also stringent access controls, with each and every process password-protected, logged and auditable. International security accreditation ISO 27001 helps to identify hosting companies that use world-class security systems to safeguard client data. As this is fast becoming the standard required by many firms and retailers, there could soon be a question mark over hosting providers who do not comply,

Performance

When the reputation of a business depends on the speed and efficiency of its service, failure and delay aren’t an option. Yet, if in-house teams – an expensive resource in themselves – are unable to keep on top of their job because they’re dealing with the paid project and development work that pays the bills then that creates the opportunity for a ‘perfect storm’ of malfunctions and errors to take down a platform.

In addition to that improving performance without compromising either the security or availability of growing volumes of data is becoming a major challenge; despite the strain which is placed on backup systems, network bandwidth and storage space. Coupled with ensuring that costs are kept as low as possible then choosing the right tools for the job become critical.

On the other hand, a managed hosting provider will have the technical expertise to monitor, spot and manage any server issues. Therefore avoiding potentially damaging consequences for the business, should issues escalate from minor to critical. DCL have expertise in performance analysis of all aspects of an application to really understand where finite resources can be applied best in order to maximise performance and keep your clients platforms working optimally.

Compliance

Depending on your end client there are a number of compliance or regulatory standards that they may have to abide by. These can range from the simpler ones like Cyber-Essentials (DCL have Cyber Essentials plus) , through ISO27001 Information Security (DCL have held this for over 9 years) through to PCI:DSS (DCL have helped several customers achieve and maintain this).

The financial services sector in particular is facing growing and unprecedented regulatory challenges; among these challenges are ever greater supervision and stringent enforcement that is increasingly confrontational and intrusive, and to which it is not always responding well. All sectors however are facing much greater scrutiny from the public who are asking that critical question of “Where is my Data ?

When your data is hosted externally, getting a straight answer to this question is not always easy. However it’s one which your chosen managed hosting provider should be able to give with confidence and accuracy. If data is held offshore, data sovereignty, as well as security, can be a concern. On the other hand, UK-held data makes UK-based companies – and their clients – feel more secure.

DCL can ensure that your clients platform conforms to the regulatory and compliance standards they have requested and can demonstrate the requirements are being fulfilled in regular reports and vulnerablity scans etc to reassure your client their system is compliant.

Conclusion

With market forces, technological advances and customer demands forcing Digital Agencies to become increasingly flexible and adaptable across the whole range of operations, recruiting staff with the necessary skills is also a growing challenge. In such an environment, looking externally to managed hosting
companies that can offer the essential specialist skills is a pragmatic and cost-effective solution.

As hosting experts, we provide bespoke hosting and managed services to companies looking to maximise performance and profitability without compromising data security. Since setting up Digital Craftsmen back in 2002, it has been our aim to bring the human touch to a service that is often offered impersonally and entirely online. That means we will go out of our way to become in effect an extension of your own in-house team, providing a service that is flexible, personal and tailored to your exact specification.