Group NBT's Managing Director for NetBenefit Reviews the Last Ten Years in Hosting 






  


    


  

    

    

            

                      

              News Date: 

                    Monday, 19 September 2011        

        




What’s changed in a decade?


Colin Bell, Managing Director at NetBenefit, reviews ten years in hosting.


The last decade has seen monumental changes in the way we use technology and how it drives business, but something which hasn’t changed is the need to keep improving, keep challenging. There’s always a better way to service our customers. We’ve spent the last ten years constantly adapting and developing our hosting offering, responding to our customers’ needs in two key areas; security and resilience.


Security & the Cloud


Security has become a more complex and increasingly business critical issue for our clients. Whilst the Cloud is a real breakthrough, some businesses are still reticent to outsource all their data onto a public cloud. The shared environment raises security questions for many companies; where is my data held is the most obvious? Are there implications for the public nature of this space? How secure are the sites of other firms using the same Cloud infrastructure as us?


For retailers, Payments Card Industry (PCI) standards have become an obsession, and rightly so. Ten years ago at the dawn of ecommerce, customers were cautious about typing their details into the World Wide Web. Today, strong security standards are a necessity. Consumers, like businesses, are aware that their data is worth something and they want it to remain private. The news is full with stories of credit card and bank data theft often from overseas hackers.


So our role has changed since the basic 2001 approach of server + firewall + back-up. Now, our offering is more complex and bespoke, focussed on offering the right counsel and technology to each business in order to provide relevant security.


Resilience & Dual site hosting


Internet retailers were in their infancy in 2001, with few companies making much money from online sales when websites were often just brochureware. Amazon, which launched in 1995, took until 2002 to turn a profit. Today many businesses face severe revenue loss, as well as reputational damage, from downtime.


We have therefore seen an increase in need for dual site hosting over the decade. Back at the beginning of the millennium, it was only banks who felt the need for dual sites, and then it was dedicated leased lines to ghost offices in the London suburbs at vast cost. Today, any company generating a significant proportion of its revenue online has to consider dual hosting and other high availability solutions.


Ten years ago, managed hosting was still in its first phase. Today, we need to be able to withstand massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks, provide the flexibility to manage huge peaks of traffic, offer scalability as businesses grow and respond to the need for increasingly bespoke services.


All this gives our customers peace of mind that their systems will stay up and the data remain secure, whatever the future brings.


 


NetBenefit is a part of Group NBT plc.