It’s nice to have friends, and if you are an MSP you may have a new pal in the Federal Trade Commission (FCC).
That compatriot is Lariss Herda, who is now chairperson of the FCC’s Communications, Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC). The CSRIC focuses on boosting the reliability and security of the overall U.S. communications infrastructure.
In her day job, Herda is CEO of tw telecom, which offers IP VPN and converged services as well as Ethernet for the business markets. Herda will head the council for a two-year term.
FCC and tw telecom’s Larissa Herda
On the council under Herda are a group of executives from technology, media, and of course various telecommunications companies. The appointment was made by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski who said Herda’s ”expertise will be critical to the council's mission … (which is) expected to include a number of challenging tasks including making recommendations on emergency alerting issues, and examining metrics for implementation of Domain Name System security extensions and secure routing.”
Herda keeps awfully busy. In addition to her new FCC role and a big job running tw telecom, she is also on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Council (NSTAC). This group advises the Obama administration on cyber security, national security and how the country should prepare itself for emergencies.
Further, Herda’s company is already on the FCC's Technological Advisory Council (TAC).
By now, you may be worried that Herda doesn’t have enough spare time to kick back. Apparently you would be right as she has three other duties including being chairman of the Denver Branch of the Federal Reserve of Kansas City, a member of the Colorado Innovation Network advisory board (COIN), and is on the advisory board of the University of Colorado’s Leeds Scholl of Business Center for Education in Social Responsibility (CESR).
tw telecom’s Newest Service
In recent news, the MSP launched a service to deny Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. The DDOS scrubbing service gets rid of bad traffic created by the attack so the business can continue to function.
“Our DDoS Scrubbing service offers granular traffic management, which protects customer network resources so they can continue to operate at high levels of quality without impeding network performance," said Trent Pham, director of Security Product Portfolio for tw telecom at the time of the announcement less than a month ago.
Research house Current Analysis had an analyst closely look at the approach as it liked what it saw. “Resilience against DoS attacks is becoming more important to a larger cross section of organizations," added Amy DeCarlo, principal analyst, Security and Data Center Services, Current Analysis. "tw telecom's service is designed to maintain stability of a customer's network without disrupting their current traffic. This gives tw telecom customers integral protection against such threats."
A tw telecom customer is already making use of the service. “We operate completely online, so being connected to the Internet is critical to our business," concluded Will Lowe, vice president of IT Operations, iParadigms. "We experienced a denial of service attack against our site, which crippled our ability to conduct business. tw telecom immediately stepped in and provided us with DDoS Scrubbing, which allowed us to recover quickly from these attacks, continue to operate online and protect us against further DoS attacks."
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
