Our Managed Hosting Services offering is structured to provide a scalable offering by allowing you to configure different service levels and features depending on your current need, and to build on these as your requirements grow. You start out with the right level of managed hosting for your current business situation, and then add capacity as the number of sites (or usage) increases. That way, you pay only for what you need, when you need it, with predictable cost structures to help you anticipate expenses and manage cash flow.

Expertise

Beacon has been providing systems management services since 1997. Our staff are experienced in building and operating business systems. Beacon delivers tangible results because our outstanding people follow a structured, specifically tailored process and share a passion for contemporary technology. We reinforce this through ongoing training, research and development and continuous improvement.

Our Systems Services team has members certified in supporting solutions from Sun, IBM, RedHat and Microsoft. Combining this with the capability to draw on members from the Software Development team as required makes Beacon the perfect partner for managing and hosting applications and servers.

Monitoring

A number of intelligent monitoring tools are deployed within Beacon managed environments providing 24 x 7 monitoring and alerting capabilities. Monitoring includes resource usage at a host and network level, through to real-time process, component and application state monitoring. Some of the tools collect data for historical trend analysis, whilst others monitor system events and raise alerts to our support team.

Cross-monitoring from alternate network locations ensure that network connectivity issues do not prevent alerts from being raised to our support team.

Reporting

Web log analysis and reporting can be provided via a secure web interface.

Capacity Planning

Many systems suffer outages due to lack of resources or a lack of understanding on how resources are being utilized. Planning is vital to ensure that a production system remains available to customers with a minimum of disruption.

The capacity planning exercise draws upon the wealth of information within the current and historical usage trends as well as business forecasts to ensure that the environment provided performs optimally.

An annual capacity plan is standard with Beacon managed production servers. Further capacity plans can be requested at any time and should be considered before any major changes (business or system).

Service Levels

Beacon aims to meet and exceed customer expectations through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and proactive account management.

Escalation processes based upon problem severity ensure that critical problems are resolved swiftly and that additional resources are added as required. Our SLA defines guaranteed response times dependent upon the incident severity.

Security Features

Beacon takes security very seriously and is extremely rigorous about protecting our Data Centres and our customers’ hosting platforms. We continually evaluate, evolve and improve our security services to keep our clients one step ahead of the game.

Benefits of our approach to security:

• Best practices developed through years of commercial experience.
• Automated intrusion detection and monitoring.
• Quick detection, identification and response to attacks and abuses targeting the hosting environment.
• Facilitates discovery of known and new vulnerabilities.
• Supports correction and elimination of security holes before they are exploited.
• Effective management and monitoring by skilled security professionals.

These provide you with peace of mind, allowing you to focus on your core business.

Network

To reduce the cost to customers the Beacon Data Centres utilise shared Managed Firewalls and Network Intrusion Detection Systems. The firewalls protect all customers from attacks beyond the perimeter whilst the Network Intrusion Detection system monitors for improper access attempts from within.

Managed Firewall

Utilising a stateful packet filtering firewall all network access is limited to desirable traffic based upon traffic type, source and destination. The firewall rules are determined on a case-by-case basis for each customer and their system. When required these restrictions can be further enhanced based upon date and time specifics.

If for any reason you would prefer a firewall dedicated to your environment and needs this can be setup and maintained; pricing is available upon request.

Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

If the firewall is considered the lock on the front door then the Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can be considered to be the burglar alarm. The IDS is a proactive way for Beacon to respond to a seemingly infinite number of security threats.

A number of network based IDS are utilised within the Beacon Data Centre. These provide both real time analysis of traffic as well as a historical basis to check for delayed distributed denial of service attacks.

Using predictive analysis techniques the IDS can provide alerts for known attack types as well as potentially suspicious activity. The intrusion detection system enables our support personnel to respond to potential security problems before a breach, denial-of-service or other type of attack occurs.

Host Security – System Lockdown and Updates

Before being connected to the network each host within the Beacon Data Centre is securely locked down and the components installed are catalogued. A number of security alert mechanisms (including SANS, CERT, AusCERT and vendor specific security lists) are monitored and compared to the catalogued registry.

When vulnerabilities are found that have potential to impact environments within the Beacon Data Centre the fixes are investigated, tested and then deployed. This ensures that machines that are being managed are secured in a timely manner from newly developed and published exploits.

Host Security – Remote Access

Customers require access to their systems, yet in this age of security awareness it is surprising how many hosting providers allow access over insecure protocols such as Telnet and FTP. This has potential to compromise the entire system and impact other customers within the same environment.

We recommend and provide access using secured protocols and encrypted tunnels. If a customer requires access via a protocol that is considered to have security deficiencies we work with them to find an alternative. If this is not possible we isolate the customer to dedicated equipment before implementation.

Business Continuity

Partners who entrust their systems into the Beacon Data Centre have business systems that they, and their customers, rely on. Keeping these systems available, and ensuring that minimal data is lost in the event of a disaster is imperative.

Benefits we can provide:

• Best practices developed through years of commercial experience.
• Redundant links to Tier 1 carriers.
• Provides you with peace of mind, allowing you to focus on your core business.

Data Backups

Data backups are typically performed on a daily basis, however this can be customised to suit your needs. Depending upon the size of the system these may be full or incremental backups.

Backup features that are offered as standard:

• Backup job monitoring and verification.
• Onsite and offsite tape rotation (daily).
• Differential backups for faster data restore capabilities.
• Database support.

Redundant Infrastructure

All core infrastructure within the Beacon Data Centre has a backup. In the event of an outage Service Levels will be able to be maintained by the swift failover to the backup equipment.