Everyone loves having complete access to their data from anywhere, but is it reliable?

In a word, yes -- if it is set up correctly. This is one area you want experts, people who have decades of experience in your industry, and The Kotter Group can provide that for you. At The Kotter Group, we take our role as stewards of the information and software of clients very seriously. We have been very diligent about the security and reliability of our systems from the beginning. Safety and reliability are what we sell.

Data Security

The Kotter Group has contracted with the winner of SC Magazine’s Best Buy Five Star Award for network security to perform hourly vulnerability scanning of both the inside and outside of our networks. This is the same service used by the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and many others to scan their own network for vulnerabilities. This service works much like an anti-virus software program in that every hour the inside and outside of our network is compared to over 18,000 (and growing hourly) signatures for every known threat, exploit, hack, etc.  All of this information is gathered in reports that can be used to show we are secure.  If a problem such as an insecure password, open share, IE security, etc., is ever detected, that event is logged and immediately evaluated based on threat level.  It is then either tagged or escalated to a live person within 30 seconds.  High threats are evaluated by a live person for risk.  If this is a new threat or attack, a custom signature can be created on the fly to protect the network. This is true zero-day protection, stopping the problem before it happens.

Others talk about data security; we have the reports to prove it.  We document everything that happens on our network.  If you are ever accused of a data breech, we can provide documentation of the actual situation to prove your innocence.

Network Monitoring

The Kotter Group is the leader in proactive problem solving with its award winning performance monitoring solution. This gives us unprecedented, instant performance details on all segments of our network, including application performance. With this tool we can do the following:

• Manage key indicators on every system in the network in real time.
• Simulate and measure Quality of Experience (QoE) with User Experience Monitors.
• Monitor performance counters to proactively troubleshoot application issues before impacting users.
• Manage advanced alerts for correlated events, sustained conditions, and complex combinations of device states.
• Leverage network service monitors to gauge performance and make adjustments before anyone notices an issue.
• Investigate network fault, performance, and applications issues from a single intuitive web console.

From a single portal we can monitor any event, manage system performance criteria, measure end user Quality of Experience, etc.  All of these events are logged for historical usage. No alerts go unnoticed by our system engineers.  With this level of information, we can stop issues before they become a problem. In the words of our users, “We love Kotter because it works.”  Combine this with the 24/7 security monitoring, and we are completely covered.

Precision Environment

We operate from a primary data center in Atlanta, Georgia.  We also use other data centers as part of our tiered data protection strategy.  Our world class data center in Atlanta is owned and operated by Peak 10, one of the best data center providers in the world.  The data center is staffed by highly skilled technical personnel 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  All Peak 10 data centers are engineered with multiple levels of security, uninterruptible power, redundant HVAC systems, fire suppression and around-the-clock monitoring and management.

Uninterruptible Power

Each Peak 10 data center is engineered with an uninterruptible power system and backup generators to deliver seamless power. In the event of a commercial power failure, the isolated UPS system will provide immediate backup power until the diesel generators take over the load and continue operation of the center.

Redundant HVAC

Peak 10 utilizes best-in-class environmental units to control and monitor the temperature and humidity in each data center facility.  The redundant HVAC systems keep the average temperature in each data center at 70 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure a consistent operating atmosphere for our critical technology infrastructure.

Fire Suppression

Peak 10 data centers utilize dry-fire suppression systems that can be deployed manually or by a sequence of three failures anywhere in a data center zone. Each Peak 10 facility is also fully equipped with smoke and heat detection sensors as well as fire doors and handheld gas-based fire extinguishers.

Network

All of Peak 10's world-class data centers are interconnected by a high performance, fully redundant private network that ensures the security, integrity, and availability of our customers' business applications and technology infrastructure.  With over 32 connection points to the Internet, it would be almost impossible for us to lose access to the Internet.  Our network infrastructure provides customers with reliable connectivity and fast performance and includes around-the-clock monitoring, notification, and reporting.  We utilize multiple Tier-1 Internet carriers with multiple fully-lit OCx connections. In addition, each data center facility deploys multiple carrier-agnostic OCx connections for maximum dependability.

Data backup

The Kotter Group has designed all systems (including staff) to be redundant (at least N+1). There is enough excess capacity in all processors and disk drives to allow for one, and in most cases more than one, failure without loss of data or loss of operation for any customer.  The maximum inconvenience is usually only having to log in again.

Data hosted on our Network Appliance FAS 2050 unit is snap-shot hourly, daily, and weekly. This is then backed up daily to another storage system, which is backed up to another city (Charlotte, North Carolina). We have recently signed an agreement with Agility Recovery Systems to provide all the hardware we need to completely move our entire operation to Charlotte within 24 hours should the need arise. The data is already there.  Now we have the hardware and data center on standby as well. Everything in our system, including the data center, is redundant.

We are also prepared to be fully staffed, even if our personnel cannot leave their homes, such as in the case of a pandemic…or just a little snow here in Atlanta.  Our new VoIP phone system allows our system engineers to perform all their work from home or, in the case of a natural disaster, from any other location.  The Kotter Group staff is not physically bound to an office, and thus is even more flexible in responding to our clients’ needs.  We run the same virtual network that our users do.  In other words, we like the system so much we use it for our own in-house needs.

Pooled servers

One of the most significant advantages of using a virtual system is the separation of mission critical components.  In a traditional terminal server/Citrix setup, a few users share the same server.  This one machine has all the software, data, etc. for the user.  This means that if ANY part of that machine fails, the users are down until a replacement is made.

We take a pooled approach to virtual hosting.  This means we have a pool of servers that run the applications, a pool of dedicated storage systems for data, a pool of servers for network management, etc.  We then make sure we always have plenty of extra capacity in the pools.  This means one of our servers could completely die and the users would not be affected.  Worse case -- the user would be disconnected for a few seconds and then log right back in and keep working.  By having redundant everything set up in a pooled configuration we can offer 99.99% uptime.

Does it really work?  We are so confident in our service, we use it.  We host all of our applications on the same system as our users.  We love it and know you will as well.