We have a long history of successfully utilizing open source software to build, deploy, optimize, secure, and maintain a wide variety of projects. This allows our customers to keep costs low while operating quality solutions that pass PCI-DSS and SAS-70 Type II audits.
We specialize in remote system administration, automation, and tuning of existing infrastructure. If your company has no qualified system administration resources, you’re plagued by system glitches, or you don’t understand why you struggle with the same issues, we can step in and assist or take responsibility.
Cloud Migrations
If you’re running on dated physical hardware, or simply want to reduce your monthly expenses by migrating away from a physical co-location, we can help. We’ve worked extensively with Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, and even smaller virtual hosting providers to help cut our clients’ costs. We can advise, deploy, monitor, secure, and maintain as you require.
Operations
Does your company struggle with the same issues over and over? Does it take too long to deploy a server, configure backups, setup monitoring? Written policies and procedures might seem like unnecessary overhead for small companies, but we’ve learned that they actually reduce time spent on routine tasks while helping to ensure the tasks are executed consistently with superior quality.
With decades of experience in Information Technology, we’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum – from heavy-handed corporate environments that stifle productivity to the chaotic nature of early stage startups. We know the appropriate operational solutions lie somewhere in between and vary from environment to environment. Our team has prepared and successfully taken companies through both PCI-DSS and SAS-70 Type II audits. Proper procedures enable a company to produce repeatable high-quality work without superhuman effort.
The next step beyond establishing procedures is automating your deployments. From server provisioning to application deployment, automation is the key to reducing errors and overhead. We use open source provisioning and build management tools to ensure low cost smooth operation.
In addition to procedures, the foundation for sound technical infrastructure depends heavily on proper monitoring, sound backup strategies, and disaster recovery preparation. Our experience in these areas primarily involve low cost open source solutions rather than expensive proprietary products.
Security
Many small companies still don’t take security seriously enough. Are your firewalls properly configured? Do your routers filter the right traffic? How often are your operating system patches updated? Is your sensitive data encrypted properly? What is your key management procedure?
If you don’t know the answers to these and related security questions, it’s likely that you have problems we can help with.
Automation
Are you still managing your environment by hand? This is inefficient in the long run, and leads to inconsistencies that cause problems and wasted time. We can automate your environment with Puppet, Chef, or Saltstack. We can also deploy orchestration to allow simpler management with Mcollective or Saltstack.
Hosting
If you have a small website or application you need to host, but are reluctant to entrust its deployment, monitoring, or maintenance to one of the large faceless budget hosts, we can offer very reasonable rates to do as much or as little as you need.
Root Cause Analysis
Do you have problems nobody else appears to be able to resolve? With broad experience spanning both development and information technology, we excel in debugging and resolving problems where many others fail.
Audit Preparation
We’ve been handling PCI-DSS and SAS-70 audits since 2005. We can answer many questions, walk you through the requirements, perform a preliminary audit, and advise you on how to prepare for an audit.
Infrastructure
We have experience ranging from designing and implementing redundant geographically-distributed large cages with hundreds of servers at tier 1 data centers down to minimizing a client’s footprint to a single small virtual machine and saving them a small fortune. We know what it takes to get the job done. More importantly, we know what it doesn’t. Do you really need hardware load balancers? Expensive top of the line firewalls? SAN? Many companies get caught up in overbuying technology. We can help.
Development
We have development backgrounds in Java J2EE, PHP, .NET, and a variety of other languages. We can provide strategic guidance and enhancements, debugging, and tuning. Having development, system administration, database administration, and architectural backgrounds gives us insights that most developers or system administrators simply don’t have. We’re a bit “old school” and believe the best coders know how the hardware works, and the best administrators know how the code works.