Success Story: City Network

Clavister’s Innovations the Answer for Cloud Security

It’s of the most blinding developments to an industry that moves the world with its disruptive innovations. Serving as the bedrock that AI will perform on, a place that—while we’re aware of it or not—our work and leisure lives and fulfills our needs, the ambient brain that connects and directs our ever increasing IoT world of smart devices, the cloud has become the most important and ambitious project in technology since the birth of the Internet itself. It’s promise is massive to both businesses and consumers and what was once a small trickle of companies using it as their platform, that has all changed as the giant cloud operators of AWS, Azure and Google made cloud too attractive cost and deployment wise to deny.

And yet there is a hesitation by many to embrace its possibilities. Hacks and breaches into social platforms like Facebook, Linkedin and Apple’s cloud are on the front page of the news and into many an IT administrator’s fears. Security and compliance issues are one of the most pressing challenges of cloud adoption.
City Network—one of the most interesting cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) operators emanating from Scandinavia with an increasing global customer base that grows by the month—knows that this is one of its key missions. “Security is a huge part of our journey,” explains Johan Christenson, CEO of City Network. “We work with large banks where regulatory compliance and security are essential elements; in fact they often overlap.” Christenson, the company’s founder after being an entrepreneur in the US with various tech ventures, quickly set about securing the funding and hiring to build the City Network cloud platforms with one eye squarely on security. “We work with large banks which means that regulatory compliance and security are essential elements; in fact they often overlap,” Christenson notes. “Companies like Clavister are critical for ones like us that need innovation and solutions so we can fulfill on our promise of global delivery and an openness that allows flexibility”. This is also something that draws attention to the synergy to the cloud’s multiple iterations and how they’re married to a high level of cybersecurity.

In fact, one of the first things to learn about the cloud is that it’s not singular but plural: different entities need different levels of compliance and trust. “First off there is a multi-cloud world with different needs; you probably don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and cloud builders need to address that,” he explains. While there is the public, internet facing cloud that we all know and a hybrid cloud as well as a private one, Christenson details how the private cloud’s regulatory compliance is one of the foundations of their company, dictating much of their high demands for processes and the absolute highest fail safe options to give their customers trust that their data is in the safest possible place. “On one hand, we have a global public cloud that competes with Azure and AWS. Then we launched a new compliant cloud for those who needs it-infrastructure with an even higher level of regulatory compliance – banks, governments etc. And a critical side of the compliant cloud is the logical side, we abide by 9 ISO standards and 7 more for data handling. We run our cloud services from datacenters that have the highest standards and the physical infrastructure; ones that can withstand as many scenarios—natural disasters, human made ones—as possible.

And again, cybersecurity becomes an increasing scenario that cloud service providers need to address. “A lot of people talk about security but it’s time that companies put that as an intrinsic part of their design,” Christenson advises his industry, making the perfect segue for a company like Clavister to fulfill that need. “We’d deployed Clavister in our network for a couple of years previously but it was in the last few— after 2016—that we made a focused decision to go all in: to use Clavister as our principal security vendor. We offer Clavister’s cybersecurity cloud services to our customers so that they can get the full benefit of their robust security solutions. It was a group decision from our technical people, CSO and of course our management to take that step,” Christenson tells of how City Network embraced Clavister as their solution. “As a cloud provider, I think we’ll continue using hardware for a long long time but there will be a hybrid approach. With Clavister, we love that we can do some software defined firewalling, VMs and at times physical firewalls.”