TMC Interviews Chris Drake from FireHost

At this year’s Cloud Expo 2011 that was held in the Jacob Javits Center from June 6-9, 2011, Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) CEO of TMC sat down with Chris Drake CEO of FireHost, to speak all about the company and its plans for the future.

Drake explained, “FireHost is a secure cloud hosting provider that offers cloud hosting in the public cloud model, not in the private cloud model that is both PCI and HIPPA secure. Our specialty is providing a secure environment for companies to have data that has to be protected, whether its credit card information or healthcare information.”

“In terms of compliance, we help our customers deal with HIPPA on the business control and security side through network segmentation. This is segmenting the web server from the database server which is hard to do in the public cloud model. Security add-ons like anti- virus, log management, and firewall typically have been add-ons in a dedicated server environment but have not been available in the cloud environment. FireHost is unique because we came out with a secure cloud offering that has security driven from the ground up and built the entire cloud model with compliance in mind,” Drake commented.

FireHost uses a multi tenant network. Drake added, it is basically “networks within networks as customers have their own networks and want to segment data into different networks, while still being able to talk to each other. They want to have the flexibility.”

Drake said, “We are friendly with many 3^rd party auditors and actually get audited by a lot of 3^rd party auditing companies. QSA is either at our data centers or facilities every week and we don’t see them as an enemy, we are able to work with auditors and have a lot as partners. Many customers ask us about auditing and security. Customers know they need HIPPA or know they need PCI (News - Alert) and don’t know how to get there, but FireHost solves most of their needs. We solve all infrastructure problems with HIPPA or PCI business process problems and if we can’t help with it, we will bring in 3^rd party auditors to help the customer. We solve the hosting side and bring in partners as needed to solve the rest.”

FireHost stands out from others in the market because as Drake said, “you have to appreciate security. If they have a need for security whether it’s for a compliance offering or to protect the brand- that’s our differentiator. We take everything that is good about the cloud from the scalability prospective and brought in security to make sure those needs are handled. The benefits of FireHost is you may not have a compliance need, but should still consider FireHost because we have a lot of customers like that who want to protect their brand and are concerned about downtime. The cloud solves this problem are there is no longer a limit to a piece of hardware, as hosting companies can replace something in as little as an hour. If a company gets hacked, you are down for a long time because then you have to go back and say how did we get hacked? That is a big risk that businesses face now.”

In the future, the company has plans to expand into Europe beyond their two locations they currently occupy in Dallas, Texas and Scottsdale, Arizona. The reason behind wishing to extend into Europe is that there is higher security compliance there, than compared to the U.S.