Studies have shown that the most common reason for downtime is circuit failure on Tier 1 provider backbones, the major data highways. To guard against this potential problem, we have three Tier-1 providers. If one experiences problems, we can route traffic down the other one. Through these public exchanges, customers have the ability to reach their site, no matter from where they are coming on the Internet. Firewalls A firewall is a security device that secures the server from possible attacks and is placed between the server and the Internet to moderate and document requests for data access according to a predefined set of security policies.
Every server comes equipped with a firewall, which is built and managed by security engineers.
The NOC staff is managed by a network security engineer with over fifteen years of experience in telecommunications cryptography. In addition to the individual firewall, the entire network is secured through a circuit level firewall, providing one more level of security for mission critical data. Since our NOC is in the same building as Global Center, Qwest and GTE, circuit failure is virtually eliminated because there is no phone circuit between us and our providers. Instead, there is a direct connection between our Cisco 7500 routers and theirs. Our providers also have peering connections with other major Tier 1 providers, which allows traffic to be switched to alternate backbones should the need arise.