Hosting

Lyons Information Systems, Inc.® offers a professional hosting environment that guarantees your applications will be available when you need them. Our commitment is to keep you online, all the time, with redundant data centers and high-speed information links. In addition, placing your applications in our professional hosting environment builds on our knowledge of your application and database elements to maximize your opportunity for supported, always available, secure, and affordable information services. The Lyons Information System platform has been running strong and secure for over 15 years, without incident. This feat highlights the quality design, expert build, and constant management we have put into ensuring this platform exceeds our customer’s expectations for security, reliability, and availability.

Hosted application environments maintain state-of-the-art technology with information security and response times that far exceed those of unhosted systems. Hosted applications are generally less expensive to manage and administer than unhosted, in-house applications due to reduced in-house demands on information technology systems and staff.


Business Continuance
Your information is your business. You cannot risk losing it. Lyons Information Systems, Inc.®’s Business Continuation solution replicates data in virtually real-time to a warm (backup) site to ensure there are two separated copies of your data. We can switch over and begin operating from the warm site in an hour or less. There are no more tape backups that require days or weeks of reconstruction – your backup data is current, always available and ready to use.

Distributed Data Centers
Our data management strategy involves two mirrored data centers. The data centers are in different cities, on different power grids, and have different backbone uplink providers. Data centers may operate separately and independently in the event that one data center fails. The data centers are connected by a high speed GigE link over a Metropolitan Area Network. Natural gas-powered generators guarantee that our data centers operate continuously — even in the event of a local power outage. We manage your application in both data centers, with one acting as the primary hot site and the other acting as the secondary warm site. The warm site is synchronized to within minutes of the hot site. This offers an extremely dependable and failsafe data security solution.

Power Redundancy
The datacenter provides multiple power feeds from redundant circuits each protected by N+1 UPS and generator systems. Fuel replenishment contracts exist to ensure generators can run indefinitely if needed.  

Environmental Controls
N+1 redundant air handling units and chillers ensure temperature and humidity is maintained.  20-foot high ceilings pull heat up and away from equipment and then out of the datacenter for disposal.  Datacenter layout provides for hot and cold aisles to ensure equipment is always ingesting cool air.  State of the art incendiary detection in the return airflow channels can catch smoldering devices before fire even breaks out, and if a fire were to occur, the latest in fire suppression technology will contain it.

Disaster Recovery
Daily local backups are replicated into the Azure cloud and stored for both onsite recovery if onsite backups become unavailable or corrupted, and for disaster recovery efforts if primary datacenter becomes unavailable.  The transmission and the storage of this backup data is encrypted.

Disaster Recovery Datacenter
We push offsite backups into Azure.  Azure is a well-known cloud datacenter and is known to provide the highest datacenter level security and component redundancy to ensure any data stored or run from that platform is protected and highly available.

Connectivity
The platform is connected to the Internet via redundant 1Gb connections.  Each connection is a blended connection of bandwidth provided by three major backbone providers, ensure no single point of failure.

Platform HardwareHypervisor
The virtualization platform is a Hyper-V cluster built with Dell enterprise grade servers with current 4-hour warranty and support contracts. Cluster nodes are interconnected with 10Gb ethernet networking.

Storage
Storage is provided by a Dell SAN running all SSD disks.  Redundant 10Gb iSCSI controllers allow for load-balancing, fault tolerance, and increased throughput for the SAN disks attached to virtual machines.

Firewalling
A Fortinet firewall cluster provides perimeter security as well as IPS and AV scanning of all inbound traffic.  NAT is also providing to protect the internal IP of machines.  The firewall is also the connection point for VPNs used by authorized persons working in the environment.

Switching
Redundant 10Gb switches provide redundant paths from each Hyper-V node to each other as well as redundant 10Gb paths from each Hyper-V node to the SAN device.

Security
FortiNet™ firewall technologies ensure that nothing gets into our network from the Internet unless we allow it. We also include virus scanning, intrusion detection, content filters, and anti-spam protection. Our data centers are housed in un-marked commercial buildings. Entry is only permitted via electronic swipe cards. Visitors and vendors to our data centers are escorted 100% of the time, and cameras photograph everyone entering and leaving the data centers.
The platform maintains all the best practice security and privacy controls, some of which are: 

  • Platform access is strictly controlled, and available only via secure VPN connectivity
  • Security updates are applied monthly for the OS and all 3rd party software
  • Data outside of the platform boundary is always encrypted, including SSL/TLS on all sites
  • No wireless networks or access points in the environment, and
  • Anti-virus/malware with real-time updates on local servers in addition to firewall AV scanning

Physical Security
The datacenter provides multi-factor authentication at primary access doors and doors into server and equipment rooms.  Visitors must be pre-authorized and escorted into the datacenter. Locking equipment cages provide internal separation between datacenter clients. 

Summary
Lyons Information Systems, Inc.® can meet all of your information technology needs from custom designed applications to professional hosting solutions engineered to keep those solutions highly available. Our hosted application and database service is reliable, secure and affordable to insure that your business applications and data are always there when you need them. While this high-level overview was not intended to go into extensive detail, you can ascertain the level of thought and layers of protection put into place to ensure a secure and reliable platform exists to provide your application the availability you need.