MSP Referentia Leverages Amazon EC2 On AccelOps Network Management, Security Platform

Instead of building its own infrastructure, managed security service provider Referentia Systems is taking a more cost-effective approach.

Announced last week, the Honolulu, Hawaii-based service provider is the first MSP to deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) using cloud and data monitoring solutions provider AccelOps' network management and security platform, according to the company.

The move to Amazon EC2 was a smart and economical choice for public cloud consumption, said Flint Brenton, CEO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based AccelOps.

[Related: Amazon Slashes Prices For EC2 Instances ]

"For Referentia, in essence, leveraging a public cloud player that is trustworthy is a key component for a go-to-market service; it's a stroke a genius because you're basically combining the best of everything and [it's] cost efficient," said Brenton. "AWS has the market share, leadership, trust and confidence to protect data and corporate assets in a public cloud environment."

When it came to looking to transition into the public cloud arena, keeping investments down was a No. 1 priority, said Anthony Kay Giandomenico, director of solutions at Referentia.

"We wanted to get in to the managed service space, and we didn't think we were ready to invest a large amount of money," said Giandomenico. "More organizations want security and modernizing services, but they don't have the budget to increase those monitoring budgets. Trying to meet that need is hard, but having Amazon allows us to do that."

From a performance perspective, AccelOps' SaaS model complete with software that manages security and network performance and Amazon EC2 is a quick and efficient enabler for Referentia, said Giandomenico.

"The combination allows us to, on the fly, turn on services that we may need, where at other times it would take us months. Here we can spin something up in days or weeks," said Giandomenico. "Because it's a limited investment, we can start off at a smaller level, smaller bandwidth. We only have to pay for the bandwidth utilized. As I grow, the Amazon Cloud can grow with me."

When it comes to moving to the cloud, managed security is an imperative, said Brenton.

"Managed security delivered through cloud is important and also growing rapidly," said Brenton. "As long as an end user has confidence that their security can be managed from the public cloud, the public cloud service provider must ensure the security and integrity of the data being processed, and that's a win-win for us."

Although cloud providers such as Amazon and others have had outages in the past, the positives will continue to outweigh the negatives, said Brenton.

"That's a market we are absolutely embracing, and you just have to do it the right way by keeping in mind what is best for the end-user customer, cloud service provider and our business here," said Brenton. "You have to work out a cooperative business model that produces a win for everybody with a cloud platform that is stable. Hiccups will happen."

As the move to the cloud is inevitable for most organizations, it must be aided by consistent monitoring, said Giandomenico.

"For us, our monitoring is the [important aspect] of the detection capability. So many times people still think that security is buying a product, but at the end of the day, it's a life cycle that is continuous and must be improved on," said Giandomenico. "You assess, implement, monitor and you monitor for new gaps, identifying, mitigating and learning from them to improve your security life cycle. And at the end of the day, it improves."

PUBLISHED OCT. 29, 2013