Edge Security and Our Strengthening Data Center Backbone

ion


The cloud is synonymous with data centers, making the term much more grounded than its airy nickname lets on. Behind the buzzword, it’s common knowledge that most companies in the world rely on a number of infrastructure, hosting, and computing providers that can be counted on one hand.

Providers of the public cloud have been hard at work centralizing their enormous collections of servers, and eating away at the empty space in the industry until the competition has mostly been gobbled up. Most opportunities for new providers are now on the “edge”, away from giant server warehouses and closer to cloud consumers.
The edge is simply where users are, it’s that simple. It’s where applications are being accessed, rather than where the servers sit. Computing, storage, and other ideas have moved to the edge to better serve users, and it stands to reason that security should be on the edge as well. Otherwise, processes like authentication and encryption occur over much longer distances and place limits on productivity – largely due to high latency.

Perimeter 81 Serves Security from the Edge

As both resources and network infrastructure management make the transition to the cloud, it no longer makes sense to conduct security through legacy solutions that were designed to protect the classically defined network perimeter. The perimeter has dissipated, and especially during the era of remote and hybrid work, it makes sense to apply security practices at network nodes where employees are located, rather than just at the traditional core. 

The edge must be secured with the same ideas required by the core, including:

  • Visibility of all resources, not just those that are on-premises
  • Monitoring that encompasses users and endpoints on the edge
  • Data and traffic privacy at all times and states
  • Resource access policies that incorporate the cloud

A quickly growing number of remote workers with access to the cloud means that countless endpoints have direct access to company data, so the same security processes that used to happen between office PCs and office servers now must happen between a mobile phone and a local data center. To help our customers achieve this feat, we’ve been building a backbone of global data centers that better supports edge networking and security.

Perimeter 81 Customers: Deploy a Custom Cloud Edge

With five new self-managed gateways being added to our already strong backbone of global data centers, Perimeter 81 customers are able to orchestrate access more safely and efficiently from the edge of their networks. These five gateways also offer customers a greater degree of control over their local hardware.

New Data Centers:

  • New York
  • London
  • Silicon Valley
  • Dallas
  • Israel

Now in production, customers are able to set up new network gateways in New York City, Dallas, London, Silicon Valley, and Israel. A crucial part of this infrastructure is that it’s proprietary and not set up by a third party, allowing Perimeter 81 (and our customers by extension) granular knowledge and control over specifications and configurations, downtime, and more.

Exercise Greater Gateway Control:

  • Proprietary managed and set-up hardware
  • Tailored configuration, downtime, and other details
  • Redundant internet connectivity
  • Connections routed through our IPs, not public
  • Priority bandwidth

We offer priority bandwidth in these locations, and do not route customer connections to our gateways through the Internet or cloud providers: All connections are direct via our own IP addresses, which prevents customers from being blocked due to public or ISP origins, and also allow the fastest speeds and lowest latency possible. 

In addition, all gateways come with redundant Internet connections that keep your users productive even on the rare occasion that an ISP connection drops. This is a new and beneficial precedent that we’re setting for our customers, who will be able to customize their networks and receive the most secure, low-latency, and streamlined experience possible.