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Security  > Offsite Storage  > FAQs - Tech 

Offsite Storage - Technical Questions and Answers

Is data encrypted at your offsite storage locations?
A.  

Data encryption occurs on your end of the data storage process. We do not want to know what your data is, and presume you would rather not give us access to your mission critical corporate data either!

Most modern backup software supports data encryption as part of either the central backup process, or as part of the transmittal of information to offsite storage.

We highly recommend you encrypt your data and burn your encryption keys to at least two CD-ROMs and store them in physically distant locations from each other.

 
Is the data transmission itself encrypted?
A.  

There are two cases here:

  1. When you send your data to us.
  2. For customers with geographical redundant storage, for when we do replicate (synchronize) to our servers.

Case 1. When you send data to us, whether your transmission is encrypted depends on the protocol you use.

We recommend, where possible, that you transmit your data to us through an encrypted channel. With an unencrypted channel it is possible for an eavesdropper to learn file names, and possibly even your offsite storage username and password!

Case 2. When we replicate between our geographically dispersed data storage locations, all communications are encrypted.

 
How are your file systems fault tolerant?
A.  

All file systems are RAID5 or RAID6.

For RAID5 file systems, each volume contains six disks or fewer with at least one of the disks designed as a hot spare with auto-rebuild.

 
What transmission methods do you support?
A.  

We support a set of the most common transfer protocols in use on the Internet.

If you have a specific protocol you need, we can look into supporting it after a security review. We operate purely open source code for our offsite storage servers, which means we can read and review the code ourselves. We will not implement or support communications protocols that require us to install closed source and/or proprietary software from any vendor.

Currently (as of August 1st 2006), we support FTP, RSYNC, SCP, SFTP and SSH.

 
Your servers have to be online and world wide accessible. How are they protected?
A.  

Although we do not want to release the full details of how our servers are protected, please keep in mind that:

  1. The offsite storage environment you connect to is a virtual server hosted on a primary 'real' server. This means there is a second security layer in the overall design, and raw devices such as the disk system itself and system administration accounts and tools are completely unavailable in the virtual layer.
  2. The 'real' server environment on which the virtual server is hosted, is not accessible from the Internet.
  3. Our offsite storage servers perform active firewalling for services. This means they monitor access logs on services provided and automatically block out access where it appears an attack is being generated from.
  4. Our offsite storage servers receive monthly security audits, and patches are applied within 72 hours of release. In addition, critical patches that we receive alerts from vendors about, are applied within 72 hours after receipt of notice and verification.
 
Whats New?
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2010.11.01 Digital telephone & PBX services expanded
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2010.10.21 IPv6 Transition
OpenAccess will be having a mid range time line for adoption and implementation of IPv6.  As most people know who are reading this, there is a certain 'chicken & egg' problem with IPv6 in as much for any organization to move to IPv6 requires that other organizations have moved to IPv6.
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2010.07.15 NAS.COM wholesale VPS and WebHosting services
This fall, OpenAccess will be re-purposing the 'nas.com' domain name to provide VPS and WebHosting services, primarily wholesale to web developers. If you have an e-mail address @nas.com, or a personal website located at http://www.nas.com/~yourusername, those services will continue be supported although we will not be accepting new accounts.
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2010.02.22 Joomla auto install wizard now available.
Due to popular request, we now have a Joomla auto-installer available on our newer cPanel® servers.  This allows customers to quickly and easily install Joomla on their website.  The auto-installer is available under the 'site software' section in the administrative interface of your webhosting account.
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2009.10.25 OpenAccess begins internal testing for Windows 2008 Server hosting solutions.
OpenAccess is happy to finally be able to announce that we are beginning internal testing of cPanelŽ/Enkompass as a platform for our customers to be able to deliver Windows(c) 2008 Server solutions on.
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2007.09.26 Changes in paper billing system.
Effective January 1st 2008 we will be doing what most of our competitors have been doing for years and adding a $1.00 surcharge for paper invoices.
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2007.05.30 New web servers in production.
In May we got two new web servers in production. These machines are based out of our facilities in Seattle and were needed as we have about hit capacity on our existing webhosting infrastructure.
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2007.03.15 Additional nationwide and global network capacity added.
OpenAccess is glad to announce that we have put into production a new circuit providing us with direct Tier-1 nationwide and global Internet transport.
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2007.01.17 Verizon DSL speed upgrades complete
Today we did the work to convert all NAS.COM customers over to our faster connection into Verizon. Everybody should be seeing performance increases.
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Bellingham/Whatcom (360) 647-0785 Toll Free: (800) 882-4979
e-mail: info@openaccess.org

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