Here at INAP, we work very hard to maintain the reputation of our network.  This includes of course, quickly and efficiently handling abuse complaints to ensure that our servers and services are not causing a problem for anyone else out on the Internet. Our abuse team makes sure that every valid complaint that is submitted to abuse@inap.com is forwarded onto the appropriate party.  That said, here is some helpful information you can use when an abuse complaint lands on your doorstep.

DON’T PANIC!
Seriously, this is the first, and most important step.  The worst thing you can do is nothing.  If we never hear back on the status of a complaint, and the malicious content is still there, we are often left with no choice but to shut off the device generating the nasty stuff until we hear back from the operator.  Make sure that your primary contact email on your account has abuse@inap.com whitelisted.  This is crucial as oftentimes the complaints we have to forward usually contain a snippet or information regarding the spam, phishing sites, etc, and it can get chewed up by your spam filter.  Even if you don’t have time or are temporarily unable to handle a complaint, let us know when you can check on it.

Got Management?
If you are unsure of how to handle an abuse complaint, and you have management for the affected server, you can always submit a support ticket regarding it.  This way, the complaint will be swiftly handled by myself or another one of our system administrators 24×7, rain or shine.  For us, it can be rather enjoyable sifting through mail logs, checking timestamps, tracking down how, when, and where spam was sent.

Resellers, Pay it Forward
If you happen to resell any of our services, it is important to ensure that your clients are dealing with abuse complaints in a timely manner as well.  After all, the buck has to stop somewhere.  Many of our larger partners operate abuse departments of their own, and work with our abuse team extensively to ensure that their own networks are kept clean and abuse-free as well.

Feedback Loops Are Our Friends!
INAP has  automated spam reporting using what are called feedback loops. How does it work?  We signed up with major mail providers (Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, etc.) so that they notify us whenever one of their users marks a message as spam that originated on our network.  Our system checks the complaint, and matches the IP Address to the server, and automatically notifies the affected operator.  Basically, if you see a lot of these during a particular timeframe, it is usually a dead giveaway that something on that IP was sending out spam.

Policy Review
If you do plan on using your server to send out large amounts of (legitimate) mail, please take the time to ensure that your methods are in line with INAP’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Usage Policy, easily reviewable at https://www.inap.com/legal/.

Cleaning Up
Once you have dealt with any abuse issues, it doesn’t hurt to verify that your server’s reputation on the internet is left intact. IP address reputation is usually governed by Realtime Black-hole Lists (RBLs), which are listings of IP Addresses accessible by DNS.  If one of these RBLs find that your IPs have been sending too much spam, they will list you, and any mail server on the internet that uses that RBL will not accept mail from you.  Some good resources to check if and where you are listed are http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx and http://multirbl.valli.org.  If you find yourself listed, the RBL will usually have information on how to get delisted, and we here at INAP are more than glad to assist you in this endeavor.

Updated: January 2019

The last time I wrote about SOC 2 reporting, it was still very new. I was still learning about these standards, and as a result, may not have been as exacting as you might have wanted. I also may have been a little hard on SSAE reports. And despite my description, there is no SSAE SOC 2 report; SSAE and SOC 2 are different types of audits.

So now, I thought it might be worth a refresh of some key SSAE, SOC 2 and SOC 3 points, thoughts and opinions. So then:

• SSAE 16 or SOC 1 is basically a replacement for what was known as SAS70. With this report, an auditor will evaluate controls as defined by the service provider and offer an opinion. Depending on how rigorously the service provider tests, the report may be extremely valuable or not that helpful to the service provider’s customers.
• SOC 2 and SOC 3 are based around the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Trust Service Principles (TSP) of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. Service providers being audited under SOC 2 and 3 are evaluated against both their own controls and some predefined TSP controls. Because of these standards, these reports are, in my opinion and the opinion of others, more likely to be useful. Note however, that a service provider is not required to test on all 5 TSPs, so there may be differences even among SOC 2 or 3 reports from different providers.
• A SOC 2 report contains the auditor’s report and details around the tests performed, the results and an opinion on the controls. A SOC 3 report only contains the auditor’s report on whether the controls meet the service criteria established under TSP. Which one is better depends on what level of detail a customer needs.
• The testing for each type of audit can be at a certain time (Type I), or over a specified period (Type II).
• No one gets certified with one of these audits. A service provider simply “successfully completes” the audit. To find out how successfully, you need to read the service providers’ reports.

Hopefully, the stuff above is useful and will help you make some informed choices. If you want some additional opinion, I am partial to SOC 2 Type 2 reports. It’s what we do here at Internap. These reports provide info about operational controls and provide auditor insight into how well those controls work. This seems to be what most of our customer’s auditors want.

But beyond that, these reports are great tools for us to benchmark our own performance. For Internap, it’s not just a marketing gimmick; it’s serious business. And that’s probably as important as any other reason when you trust your business with us.

Choosing a hosting platform that meets the unique needs of your business can be challenging, and many variables must be considered when making IT infrastructure decisions. Different use cases and workloads can require different infrastructure options, and other factors such as sensitivity to latency and downtime, speed of deployment and security must also be evaluated.

To address this challenge, we’ve created the Solution Builder, an online tool to help you navigate the myriad of infrastructure options available, from colocation and managed hosting to private and public cloud.

The Solution Builder considers a variety of factors, including the nature of your specific project, the technical application or architecture requirements and the geographic location of your deployment to create a personalized recommendation. This interactive tool even provides real-time feedback that shows you how different requirements will alter the type of infrastructure that fits your needs.

Agile hosting – If you require a rapid deployment with no long-term commitment, Internap’s Agile hosting platform may be a good fit.
Managed hosting – For companies that require a more customized solution and prefer to evenly distribute the costs of deployment over the life of the application, a managed hosting solution can provide increased control.
Colocation – For organizations that want to own and manage their own hardware and equipment and take advantage of shared power connections, HVAC systems, physical security and redundant architecture, colocation may be the best option.

Evaluating your infrastructure options? Internap’s Solution Builder can help you find and build the solution that best fits your requirements.

To create a cost-effective infrastructure option for housing big data deployments, many IT organizations have been forced to use a combination of cloud, dedicated hosting and colocation from multiple providers. But the emergence of new colocation services that provide cloud-like flexibility along with secure physical infrastructure helps meet the demands of big data through data center hybridization.

Today, the largest hard drive you can buy provides 3 terabytes of storage. Online gamers playing Battlefield 3 will generate enough data to fill that entire drive in just three days. Twitter generates enough information to fill one up in a mere six hours. Facebook is even more impressive: they collect 500 terabytes of data per day, which means it would take them a scant 8 minutes to fill up the world’s largest hard drive.

So where do companies actually put all of that data? If you’re Facebook, Twitter, Google or one of a handful of other industry titans, you build your own data centers and fill them with servers as fast as you can build them. But if you’re not yet a multi-billion dollar corporation, building your own state-of-the-art data center is probably not a viable option. Cloud and dedicated hosting can provide flexible contracts and tools that make hosting and scaling traditional web applications easier, but these options make less sense when you start talking about storing petabytes of big data.

The evolution of colocation
Many companies find that the most cost-effective way of deploying a big data cluster is to put it in someone else’s state-of-the-art data center via colocation. But cost-effectiveness is only part of the equation. Traditionally, colocation hasn’t been able to offer the customizable options of dedicated hosting, or the agility and flexibility of cloud. Whether it’s trying to meet additional seasonal demand, running an intensive one-off report on your big data deployment, or deploying a new web application, companies can’t wait four weeks to deploy it in a collocated environment. They need access to on-demand resources.

Hybridization
The ability to connect your colocation and cloud resources can fill this void, and help bridge the gap between big data deployment and the cloud. Internap’s Platform Connect offers true hybridization and allows you to seamlessly link your colocation, Custom and Agile hosting, and AgileCLOUD environments across the same layer 2 or layer 3 network within any of our Agile-enabled facilities. Launching your new free-to-play game next month and need to make sure your MongoDB deployment can temporarily handle a 500% increase in the amount of data you’re collecting? Need to run a series of reports on your CouchDB deployment that’s already seeing 85% utilization? Want to replicate your 80TB Hadoop deployment for a few weeks so you can see firsthand what effects an hdfs changes will have on your queries? No problem.

Multiple services, one provider
Instead of searching for multiple providers – one partner for colocation and IP, one for dedicated hosting and one for cloud – Internap offers multiple services under one roof, including award-winning colocation for housing your big data, the industry’s fastest and most reliable IP , exceptional Custom and Agile hosting services for your websites and mission critical applications and the fastest and most cost-effective cloud for your on demand needs. Being able to reach out to a single provider who understands your IT needs at every layer of the OSI model is a small but important step.

Until now, traditional colocation has taken a backseat to dedicated hosting and cloud computing, but it’s emerging as an agile, cost-effective option for housing big data. The ability to hybridize your data center with Platform Connect and apply cloud-like flexibility to physical servers offers IT organizations a best of both worlds approach to big data deployments. (See these capabilities in action at Internap’s New York Metro data center.)

Learn more about how Platform Connect can hybridize your data center and provide a new approach to big data infrastructure challenges.