Cloud Therapy: EP 019 – Business Internet Security and Continuity

August 29, 2016 Aerocom

EP 019

Jose DeHoyos, Sr. Sales Engineer at XO Communications, has seen a lot of real-life scenarios of the good things that can happen with a fantastic business Internet connection. But he’s also seen the bad.

Jose joins Mike to give some tips on Dedicated Internet Access Security and Continuity. Basically… the art of keeping your connection safe and up. He also has a great story that you’ve gotta here.

Josh Chamois makes his second appearance on the podcast to tell everyone about an Ethernet promotion that every small location should jump on. Then, Mike makes Josh pull up a famous site in Canton, OH. to see what we can find…

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Transcript:

  Mike: Hey, IT Nation. Welcome to CloudTherapy with AeroCominc.com, where you learn about the latest cloud and telecom technology that is gonna take your career to the next level.

I’m your host, Mike Smith. Let’s do it.

Thank you for joining us on yet another episode and yes, we do have another great one for you to help you get a little bit better today which is always the goal: get a little bit better every day.

All right.  So all of you, guys, know what DIA is, right? Dedicated Internet Access. So I’ve got a great guest on board today that is gonna talk about when DIA can go wrong. So, I’ve got Jose DeHoyos. Now, he is the Senior Manager of Sales Engineering at XO Communications. So, for years he seen a lot when it comes to businesses installing Dedicated Internet Access connections. So what Jose wanted to talk about is when companies install that, he seen so many things happen with very competent IT teams in regards to DIA security breaches and problems that are going on with DIA and how to kinda troubleshoot them and how  to solve them, and how to avoid them more than anything else.

So I know every one of you out there has internet access and most of you probably have dedicated internet access. And I tell you, Jose is one of our favorite sales engineers to work with because he really knows his stuff and he’s very personable and he’s a great guy. So definitely something you wanna tune in for today and you’ll definitely learn a little bit.

Also on the show, we have Josh Chamois visiting us again. And Josh has a phenomenal deal. He’s gonna tell us about on 5 Meg, 10 Meg, and 20 Meg Ethernet over Copper. So make sure you stick around for that. And also, I challenge Josh to find something somewhere at a location in Canton, Ohio. Can you guess what location that might be in Canton, Ohio? Well, if not, don’t worry, hang in there. Josh is gonna tell us all about that or I’m gonna throw it at Josh, so to speak.

All right. Also I wanted to make sure I cover our giveaway as always. I always have a free give away with our podcast. I like we’re awarding you guys for being podcasts listeners. And so if you  wanna hear more than one promotion that’s going on and Josh is gonna tell us about one but if you wanna hear more than that, we put together a whole list of the best business internet promotions going on right now from all different service providers. So we’ll go ahead and email that to you. All you have to do is text the word ISPDEALS, that’s D-E-A-L-S, to the number 44-222. Just text the word ISPDEALS to the number 44-222, and we will email you your free list of business internet promotions going on right now.

Okay. So let’s get to the program starting with Josh.

What’s up, Josh? How are you doing today?

Josh: Mike, how are you doing today? It’s a wonderful day. It’s sunny here in Southern California and I’m feeling good. I got some nice promotions to let the people know about.

Mike: That’s what I was gonna ask you about. I’m glad you beat me to it. So what do you got?

Josh: All right. So I have a particular carrier here that has a couple different flavors of Ethernet promotional pricing, all right? So one way–so the main reason that I even know about this promotion is actually I was working with one of my smaller clients. They wanted to upgrade their bandwidth. They don’t have a ton of budget for their telecom spend and they really just wanted to get out of the T1 Space. It just–it wasn’t adequate for what they do on a day-to-day basis in terms of their network and how they utilize the internet and they–and they really just wanted to increase their bandwidth without breaking their bank. So I went to…

Mike: What? Wait, wait, wait. They didn’t want a T1?

Josh: Yeah. Crazy. That was one of those people. T1, come on, man? Yeah, so they wanted to get out of that market. So I said, “All right, great. Let me try to do some homework for you, guys. I’ll get back to you soon.”

So in doing that, I found a couple providers and then I found one that actually stuck out of my mind because of this particular promotion. So what I wanted to achieve here was increase the bandwidth but without necessarily breaking the bank again. Right. That’s what they wanted. That’s what I’m here to do. Do what they want, right?

So I found a carrier that is offering – and they’re actually offering this promotion now through September 30th, 2016. Right. So almost a two full months minus a week. So, yeah, here it is. So it’s 5×5, okay? Symmetrical. 5 Meg down, 5 Meg up for a whopping 2 Meg at $89. Can you believe that?

Mike: Wow.

Josh: That’s pretty incredible. And this is not–this is…

Mike: Is that Fiber?

Josh: Yeah, this is for Fiber. This is for Fiber. Excuse me, I apologize. Real quick. This is for Ethernet over Copper. Ethernet over copper also known as EOC.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Josh: Yeah. Uh-hmm. Yup. So the next–the next tier up is it’s 10×10 for $399. And a 20×20 for $699. So one of the cool things with this offer and with it being EoC so if you’re in the market and you wanna get out of that T1 arena and you wanna increase your bandwidth but you wanna keep your cost minimal, right? Great way to go, Ethernet over Copper, really has some–really aggressive pricing and with this promotion it’s even more aggressive, right? But this is also a good play if you want to bring in another circuit just to add some redundancy to your network, right? You have a Fiber connection on your that kinda has your main traffic but you wanna–you don’t feel safe because you have nothing backing that up, right? Nothing keeping you from going down, from a back hoe, cutting the line behind the building or the big earthquake, right? I don’t know. So great, great, great solution if you wanna add some fill over some redundancy to your internet connectivity because it’s inexpensive and you get pretty decent bandwidth. I think 5, to 10, 20 Megs can hold over any corporation for a little bit while that main circuit is patch and brought back up. So, yeah.

Mike: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. That is fantastic pricing on the EoC. All right. So are you ready for the challenge today?

Josh: I am ready. Bring it on. Bring it on.

Mike: All right. So I’ve got another obscure location for I believe it’s relevant to what’s going on right now. The NFL Hall of Fame.

Josh: Oh, my favorite sport.

Mike: You know, and I–and it comes to mind to me right now because I went to turn on the TV. I thought our first NFL game in season is gonna be on Sunday and they had cancelled the game. The NFL Hall of Fame did not have a game because they screwed up the paint on the field.

Josh: Oh, wow.

Mike: So that just came to mind as a cool place to throw out and also if you’re thinking of starting a business right there at the NFL Hall of Fame, this might be a great thing for you to listen to or just for giggles, let’s see what’s going on there.

Josh: All right.

Mike: So I want you to try to pull up how many fiber providers are there like how many and who are they? That would be really interesting for us to find out.

Josh: All right. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let me just do my usual song and dance here. I’m typing some of this necessary information. Hall of Fame, NFL. Okay. Contact. Peter Rabbit.

Mike: Peter Rabbit.

Josh: You just type in at the…

Mike: Exactly.

Josh: I just–I don’t know. Ella is the first name that came to my head. I got it reading a book with my book with my daughter. All that Peter Rabbit, so that was last night.

Mike: That’s awesome.

Josh: First name to come to mind.

Mike: What a good dad.

Josh: I try.

Mike: Reading at night.

Josh: All right. That’s step 1. All right, step 2. What they really need is the service location, transport fiber, forge, Ellis 5 Northwest, Canton, Ohio. Okay. All right. All right. Here we go.

Mike: Was it thinking?

Josh: System is thinking.

Mike: Cool. So while it’s thinking. Let me–did you–did you catch any of that fiasco that was going on over there, the packers that were supposed to be planning a cold. Did you see that?

Josh: No. You know what? I did see that. So I was actually watching TV little later in the evening and that came across my menu with my cable provider as what was supposed to be on but it wasn’t on. So I was a little confused. I think they were doing like a special Jeff Saturday and Patton Manning and their relationship, you know, the center and the quarterback.

Mike: That’s fascinating.

Josh: Yeah. And I’m like did they–did they play today, like, because I wanted to see it, you know, it was a little late. I said I knew the game and if they did play, it’d already ended so I wanna see what happened, you know? But no, it was–it was Jeff Saturday and Peyton Manning’s lonely relationship on and off the field. So, yeah, I had no clue the game had been cancelled not until you just mentioned that now.

Mike: As an example, can you imagine if you’d taken one, you know, your kids or your family to come see the game and like traveled all the way there. Because it’s for the, you know, they do the Hall of Fame induction for the, you know, for the NFL, you know, it’s a yearly thing and then you plan on seeing the game and the whole game is cancelled. And you’re like, “Gosh, man, that–what a fiasco.”

Josh: Yeah. No kidding, man. No kidding. I wonder if there’s gonna be any type of, you know, retribution for that or, you know, I don’t know. Do you think they’d get their money back?

Mike: No. No, the NFL is broke, man. They don’t have any money. They don’t have that kind of money.

Josh: No, no way. Pay people back, obviously not. They’re just making gazillion dollars a year. Yeah.

Mike: Every which way.

Josh: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. So it seems still thinking. Okay, here we go. Here we go. So you wanted to know how many just the volume that we have.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Give me a–give me a count. And then if it’s–if it’s something under ten just to read them on.

Josh: Okay. So it’s a one, two, three–yeah, it’s under 10. So the carriers that I was able to pull back pricing from and it’s okay to read them off of. All right. We got ACC Business, which is a subsidy area of AT&T. AT&T, Birch Communications, Earthlink Business, PowerNet and Telnes. And those are the carriers that we got some bits back from in Canton, Ohio.

Mike: Now are those all–are those all providers with Fiber there or is there like a map that shows like–is there anybody that’s even close by?

Josh: Yeah. So let me–let me do this. Actually, there’s a couple other that I missed. Earthlink business is another one and GTT, G-T-T, gold, tango, tango. So let me do this. I have another tool that actually lets me pull Fiber paths with a map, an overhead view, I presume via Google. But it has the Fiber paths already mapped on to that map. So you could see–all right. Hey, the tool didn’t pull this provider but it looks like they have a Fiber path right out in front of this particular location. Let’s go ahead and give them a shot too on this bid. So let me–let me see if I can do that. Let’s see what we come with–let’s see if there’s any additional carriers that weren’t listed. Okay. All right. Just thinking, just thinking.

Mike: What is looking out  there, everybody listing as, you know, sometimes if a provider has fiber built to a nearby building or is–it’s, you know, just running right past your building in the street, you know, if it’s all within around 500 feet, the service provider a lot of times will bring it to your building for free with no installation charges. If it’s more than that, sometimes there’s a little bit of construction cost but so that’s what why that map is huge is we can pull up within, you know, just a few–a few seconds, you know, if there–if there’s provider in your building or if they’re nearby because if they’re nearby, you’d never know unless you look at a map like that.

Josh: Right. Right. So, I do show that Zayo Group has a fiber out in front of the profile for hall of fame. Another carrier that’s in the area but not really close, I’m thinking that if, you know, this business steps on the profile for hall of fame campus, if they wanted to get fiber, it would probably be an expensive construction build. It looks like it have to kinda cross couple streets, turns across a couple parking lots.

Mike: Yeah, that might get pricey but that provider is Windstream. Looks like they have some fiber access available but again it’s just not close which is probably making it not feasible for the client to actually get that.

Josh: Yeah. So, hey, if anybody is listening who works at the NFL Hall of Fame, you can go ahead and take that to your boss and be hero.

Mike: Exactly.

Josh: Like it’s lighter.

Mike: Exactly. That’s awesome. Well, cool. I think that’s fun information and again, you know, it’s just kind of helping highlight some of the cool stuff that you have access to doing and making sure people know that they can get this type of information really fast. They don’t have to start making 20 calls to get that kind of stuff. They can just call, you know, broker or someone like us and have it done right away, right on the phone.

Josh: Absolutely. Yup.

Mike: All right. Well thanks, Josh. We’ll catch you next time.

Josh: You got it, Mike. Take care.

Mike: So how many of you guessed right when I mentioned Canton, Ohio. Did you guess which place I was taking about with the NFL Hall of Fame there? I thought so. All right. So, again, if you want to ask Josh any further questions or you’d like Josh to run a similar query for an address you have, all you have to do is email [email protected] or call us at (877) 465-3505 or just hit us up on the chat window on our website and you’re probably get a hold of Josh. Josh will probably be the person helping you and you can tell he’s a great guy and he’ll help you out. No problem. And no obligation, obviously. Doesn’t cost you anything and let Josh run with it and see what he can come up with.

Okay. So our next guest as I mentioned earlier is Jose DeHoyos. Now, Jose knows a ton about dedicated internet access and all of you IT professionals out there have dedicated internet access and Jose is going to teach you a couple things and really tell you a couple cool stories about when dedicated internet access went bad with some of the customers that he’s experienced. When it comes to security or downtime or things like that and what you can do to avoid these types of problems. So without further ado, let’s talk to Jose.

Welcome to the program, Jose.

Jose: How are you doing, Mike?

Mike: Doing fantastic. Thanks for coming on. So, you know, obviously, I know you. I’ve worked in the past. You’re one of our favorite engineers to work with. So, but the audience doesn’t know you. So tell us a little bit about yourself personally and professionally.

Jose: So, professionally, I currently work for XO Communications. I’m a Senior Sales Engineering Manager work in the enterprise sales channel as well as the indirect sales channel. So I have engineers all the way up from Washington State, to California and Nevada and Las Vegas, been there about six years. Prior to this, I was at Global Crossing for 12 years. I was a VP of Sales Engineering for the West. And prior to that I was a Sales Engineering Manager at Sprint. Been doing this technology for about 30 years, 37 years. Prior to Sprint, I was in data centers so I was in the private sector so been involved in a lot of stuff.

Currently married, 32 years this year to my beautiful wife, Lisa. And…

Mike: Wow, congrats.

Jose: Yeah. It’s a big milestone.

Mike: Yeah, that’s great.

Jose: Yeah, I have–I have two kids. One is Christian, he’s 27. He’s actually getting married in November which is a big deal.

Mike: Yeah.

Jose: He’s in tech. He’s worked for several different startups. My daughter, Marissa, she’s 24. She’s also in tech. She’s actually an IT technician at a company, a big toy company, toy manufacturer up in Santa Monica. So–yeah, kids are following around their dad–with their dad. So it’s good stuff.

Mike: Yeah, that’s cool. When they’re decision makers just make sure you send them my way.

Jose: Yeah. Yeah. It just gets crazy in this house when everybody is in here for the Holidays. And at some reason like, “Why do you have so many passwords for your wifi access. What’s the matter there?” Everything gets crazy.

Mike: So is your wife technical at all? Does she used to sit there and roll her eyes or she jump right in the conversation?

Jose: No, she understands some but, no she’s more–she’s actually a contract manager. She handles–and she’s actually gonna be working for the big Burbank municipality airport redevelopment structure so she’s a solicitor [inaudible] 0:18:21 and my brother is also a VP of IT. So it’s even better when the whole big family is involved. It’s crazy in here.

Mike: Oh my god, like, that’s–well, you know, I envy you a little bit because in my household, I’ve got four kids. My oldest is 12, they’re fairly young but my wife is totally non-technical and my wife and kids are more on the artistic side, you know, so they’re, you know, like in terms of tech around the house like it’s, you know, it’s–everything is moving to technology but I feel like I’m like–I’m like the IT guy in my house who’ve gone, you know, fixing stuff. I mean, there’s–I’ve got a–I’ve got a to-do list. A mile long of batteries to change, all the ways to things to perm like last night, I was trying to help my daughter figure out a projector that she’d bought on Amazon and trying to get it to work with her cell phone and, you know, and trying to get this in. I’m like, I can’t figure this. I cannot spend an hour on a projector that you bought on Amazon, that you don’t know how to work and that–and its got horrible directions but at least you’ve got a lot of go-to’s when it comes to all the gadgets that are rolling out in the household these days.

Jose: Yeah, but that would be–I was in the same boat as you when the kids are growing up. It was ridiculous. “Hey, my laptop is not working. What’s going on here?”

Mike: It’s like, oh my gosh, like and all the gadgets that everything now is wifi enabled and so it’s like, “Okay. If we got a, you know, if you just get it out of the package like we got to hook it up to the wifi. We got to get it to do this, get it to do that, and then if, you know, heaven forbid, it ever works quirky, you know, you’re going, “Oh my gosh, I need a–I need a, you know, an assistant.”

Jose: And that’s what’s great about the topic today because that’s exactly where this world is going to. Everything is mobile and, you know, even corporations with their BYOB, it’s a challenge and it’s a–it’s neat. But yeah, you feel [inaudible] 0:20:17.

Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, today, you know, we talked about it a little bit before the show but Jose is gonna be talking to us about DIA, that’s Dedicated Internet Access and if you guys want definitions on that, you know, just reach out to us or look in our website. There’s a ton of information on, you know, defining what DIA but we won’t get into that too much today. We’ll just kinda skip to Jose’s topic which is gonna be really about how you can secure DIA access locally for your company. There’s a lot of ways DIA access can go bad for your company. So, you know, whether it’s a security issue or downtime or things like that and there’s a lot of things you can do locally to prevent that. And that’s what Jose has seen a lot of in his career obviously. He’s seen a lot of ways that it can go well and he’s seen a lot of ways it can go wrong. So he’s gonna share a ton of information with everyone today on things that they can do internally and locally to secure their DIA internet access for their company as well as make sure they have maximum uptime. So with that, I’ll just kinda turn it over to you, Jose and lets you run with it and then, you know, just please bear with me as I chime in and ask stupid questions.

Jose: No, you’re not. There’s no stupid questions when it comes to technology. That’s what’s great about this. But thanks a lot, Mike.

Yeah. So today, I’m gonna talk about DIA but more importantly about DMZ. DMZ in network terms, it’s a Demilitarized Zone. And in computer networks, A DMZ is a physical or logical sub-network that separates an internal local area network which is a LAN and other untrusted networks. So like you have the DNS website and things like that usually in the internet.

External facing customer, resources, you know, located in the DMZ, they can be accessed by anybody but the internal LAN which usually has your proprietary corporate information, your retail store information, you know, things like that. That remains unreachable by anybody trying to use the internet access from your store, office, headquarters. So it’s a little bit of additional security within your LAN and they restrict hackers from being able to get in there to directly access that data from the internet, via the internet. So first example I’m gonna give you. We had a retailer that what they did they opened up wireless access at their stores. They had a vendor or product specialist come in there and, you know, supply them with access points. They saw where mobility was a big thing and they want to be able to access their store information and things like that using their mobile phones. But what they did is they never partitioned their DMZ, the network, the environment. So wireless users were readily accessing their corporate internal information and they started seeing this when they were starting to do queries on the network. They’re looking at all these different IDs that were popping up, that they had no idea where they were because they weren’t part of the same addressing scheme as they had in the corporation.

Mike: So there were people going in there and looking at like their, you know, like their financial information and things like that?

Jose: And so a spreadsheets, different project files, things like that, yeah. And, you know, it’s funny because we talk–in the–if you’re in technology, you think of like, “Well, that’s crazy. I would have done this. But you need to understand there’s  lot of–there’s a lot of people out there and small retailers that they don’t really understand the full text idea. They, you know, they understand–okay. We got to have the firewall. We know about that and, you know, the hook up something but they’re not fully vetted as far as what are the all the ramifications that they can–that they can actually be exposed to. So that comes up. It’s wild. We had another example where we had a tire store. A tire shop, they want it opened–they opened up their wireless network at stores and they did this because, you know, replacing tires on cars sometimes takes about an hour so depending on how much people are in there. And what they did is they thought they were really controlling everything on the–on the internet side by going out of firewall through headquarters. So, you know, all the stores have private network and they were wireless accessing it. Boom, it was going out. But what they had a problem with was they didn’t correctly partitioned the waiting in the routers and by waiting–I mean, like class of servers like this internet of traffic off of this part of the network would be a wireless, would take the lowest priority of the network and then maybe, you know, regular internet traffic for your corporation would take a little higher some service there. Well, they didn’t do that. And what they noticed everything on their internet was just completely bugging down. Well, everybody at the store is using the wireless which is just inundating their internet access and it was–they couldn’t even function until they started figuring out–we actually did some–I wouldn’t say consulting but it’s what we do at all customers and look at their traffic and tell them, you know, what’s going on. And we started noticing this and we kind of, you know, said, “Hey, why don’t you try this part.” Sure enough it works. So just, you know, that’s a point where security was there but they didn’t do the partitioning correctly again and, you know, use the DMZ where they could have that wireless traffic on the lower end scale and it was over inundated their pipe so it could work in a good and a bad way. As far as, you know, it is secure but you still have major problems with congestion and things like that. So both of these examples, you know, they could have been partitioned with the DMZ or one or two, you know, either you can do one firewall and do a both, you know, public and private internet or use two firewalls and one runs all your public stuff and one runs all your private stuff. You could do it either way. So, those are just two examples of how DMZ works in an environment like that.

Mike: Makes sense. Yeah. So there was a situation where–and it’s not–this is not–okay. It’s not really DIA but I’m gonna kinda talk to it and how it could be incorporated. So we had a–we had a motorcycle manufacturer that we were talking to them and they already had–they  had their [inaudible] 0:26:45 network. They were using SIP Trunking, they were–they had SIP access, so they were doing VoIP over their network. I mean, it’s state of the art. Let’s do it again. But when we started talking to them, they start asking questions about security platforms and, you know, we’ve done SBCs and things like that. And they’re like, “No, no, no. We need to know what can we do on the inside.” If we start digging in more, asking–why are you asking this?” Well, it turns out somebody from the corporation actually created an access number where he could take a–people could dial in to the corporate platform, input a code and automatically get secondary dial tone to make a long distance international call via their SIP trunks out of their IP PBX which was–okay. You got a bigger problem here because you have an internal weakness as far as an employee causing this and that’s hard to deal unless you’re monitoring every single call. But I say this, even though it’s not DIA and it was actually just, you know, dial tone but it could be replicated using DIA and a new–and some of these VoIP platforms for example Skype or things like that, you know, it’s an advantage. It’s all IP based so it’s not far-fetched that even in that type of environment, you can have major catastrophe just using phone–just thinking phone calls because everybody is moving from traditional TDM and going into a more of a unified communications platform which is IP. So you’re doing all your data on IP, you’re doing all your voice on IP, you’re doing your video on IP and when even you’re ordering now when things like for Amazon web services in the content side, it’s all done over IP. And so this is another way that, you know, think internet but at the same time, you know, keep your mind a little open and talking think about what other applications or environments within my land corporate network can be infiltrated or, you know, accessed and what can happen to it.

Mike: So how would you go about blocking a situation like that?

Jose: You–yeah. So, in that piece, it would have to be–you would look at your corporate infrastructure and phone calls to where. Where do you really phone calls to as a corporate infrastructure and all other locations just completely shut them down because they’re, you know, having country codes and things like that in these new IP PBX, you can control and really collapse the accessibility of where you’re making phone calls to. And then you start doing daily, you know, you run a daily or five weekly type of quality check just, “Okay, let’s just do a quick scan to see some trending. Why is everybody calling a–I don’t know, let’s just pick on Peru  and all the phone calls happen at night. Nobody is here, what’s going on with this?” So, you know, little bit of due diligence on the–on just the monitoring side of the house would know. But yeah, shutting down accessibility to certain countries where you know you’re not making phone calls to and, you know, there’s countries that you’re not even working with so doing that type of stuff.

Mike: Yeah, that’s very true. I mean, being in telecom for a number of years, I’ve, you know, I’ve looked in my shared phone bills and, you know, and in reality, you know, those phone bills probably don’t even get audited but once every couple years and people just kinda set them up and forget about them so that is something that happens a lot. I’ve, you know, done a phone bill analysis and showed so many clients like, “Okay. Here’s a breakdown of the miniature using where you’re using.” I mean, and so many times all these international countries pop up or, you know, it’s like one or two and they’re like, “That’s funny. We don’t ever call Canada, or we don’t call Mexico like we don’t have anything, you know, going on there. And, you know, especially being in Southern California, we’re pretty close to the–to the border. So it’s, you know, they’ll see things like, “Oh, man, like somebody’s calling family and it’s all the time.” And it’s like they’re, you know, not only they’re calling during the workday, they’re calling, you know, international numbers and things like that. So to get idea to just–yeah, you know, no way you have no business calling and lock those down because, you know, in reality they’re probably not gonna be able to check their phone bill that often, you know, in a perfect world they would but, you know, if they don’t have the alarm set then at least like monitor the dollar amount that your phone bill typically is and, you know, have your billing people do that, know that–hey, alert you. And there’s a 15% or so uptake or down take in that threshold and seen like, hey, you know, all of a sudden, we got–we’re billing 15% more than we used to. What’s going on? And have that be a little bit of an alert so you guys can monitor but–yeah, that’s a good idea just at least shut down international call except for the one or two countries maybe that you do call and just leave the rest of them, you know, lock down.

Jose: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there’s an application performance monitoring, you know, appliances out there that will–they will do exactly what you just said to. They will actually monitor when you get to a threshold, there’s reports that can pull up within seconds. I mean, literally you type in, “Hey, I need to know between this day and this day and how–who called and what number and what number did it actually come from?” So you could actually go back in time and find out exactly who made that phone call from where and, you know, Sally Joe’s over there, you know, at 3:00 in the afternoon calling wherever but there’s ways to do that. And once it happens once, I guarantee it’ll never happen again because you’ll be all over just like everything else in life, you know, shame on me once, shame on me twice, whatever but yeah, so that’s one thing that really be cognizant out.

Mike: Yeah. And too, I was thinking about mine, I’m like, you know, if the person is craft enough like an example you give where they’re setting up like a log in and stuff like that, they’re also craft enough to be originating those numbers not from their own, you know, not from their own stations. So it’s like it’s a probably another lesson like don’t jump to conclusions when you see who in the office is  making those calls because like in your scenario, I guarantee that wasn’t the person who’s doing it. They probably set it up on somebody they didn’t like or an open desk or something like that and so that it wouldn’t be traced back to their station probably. Although, you know, you always hear these stories about stupid criminal.

Jose: Well, you never knew. It could have been–I mean, it could have been tracked all the way to the CIO and nobody within second guess that gonna make an international call so it’s like, “Wow, okay.”

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s your own DID. You’re like, “What?” Now, I’m really mad.

Jose: Oh, too funny. Okay. Let’s see when give [inaudible] 0:33:30 okay. So, we have an issue with customer had an access, DIA access on the West Coast and they wanted to expand their network capabilities so they wanted to put another access port on the East Coast. So these are, you know, this customer–it was–these are big. They’re running Gig lines, Gig port for DIA so they’re running a lot of traffic. The west coast traffic was working great. No big deal. We turned up the east coast traffic and next thing you know they’re having problems right out the gate. I mean, literally right out the gate. It’s not working. They were like, “What is going on? We’ve checked our connectivity, we’ve checked all the cable. We’d check everything. We’re like, “What is this?” So we started to run trace routes. And then what we figured out and this is are not working with the customer. We figured out the customer, the partner that they were trying to access, their network was having major issues with flapping and things like that and would not let the connection happen. It kept bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. So even though it looked like it was our DIA because we were a new turn up that was happening, it actually wasn’t us. It wasn’t networks issue. But the Knock did do further investigations which the Knock has a lot of great capabilities right now with different appliances to be able to check this stuff and they figured out, “Okay. You got to call your partner here because he’s flapping like crazy. We just moved your traffic over to another port and it works great. So, that’s how they were able to make sure that it was, you know, that it wasn’t our issue but this is more of a message that even downstream things can cause issues that you think are internal to your land so it’s more of segmentation, breaking it up little by little and in trunks and making sure that you’re isolating different areas to make sure that, “Okay. This is fine. This is fine.” And I mean, we’ve had–we’ve had a customer with a fiber connector was bad that caused all kinds of havoc. They thought they were gonna have to rewire all cross connecting the patch panel but it turned out it was just a cable. So many scotch marks which the cable came right up. So that’s what I mean by trouble shotting on the DIA side, anything that happen in even downstream things can cause issues for you, so.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense.

Jose: Last piece the working on–when a lot of customers now have WANs in place. And what they’re looking at is disaster recovery and what’s be more problem out there is using dedicated internet access as a back–as a backup scenario when their LAN goes–when their WAN goes bad. So just things to be aware of when you’re –when you’re having an MPLS network or private line network with someone with a carrier. Ask a lot of questions on the background of–if you’re gonna be using the DIA for backup and how that backup plan is gonna work. Okay. So you’re gonna–we just turned up a network where customer assumed that they would be able to run HSRP or BRP which is a high speed route protocol so–high speed redundant protocol so they run both the routers have a ring topology within the land scheme and they were actually prior to this were controlling both the routers.  Well, in the carrier environments, we manage one router in certain cases and that DIA is a third party router which we have no visibility too. So in most case, we won’t let the customer do a certain protocol on our router and that’s what was the case here. So we needed to run BGP and the customer ended up, put into layer three switches into as a LAN environment at all those stores in order to induce this backup redundant scenario so they can be backup in working in case something happened to the LAN. But I say this only because everybody thinks about, “Okay. I got my DIA up, or I got my broadband up,” for example. “And I got my WAN up, all I have to do is make sure it just floats back and forth but this is more of a design thing in the LAN infrastructure as the engineer you’re working with that provider, “Hey, I’m gonna be doing this. Can I do this?” And do it prior to two turn up. We have–we’ve had a lot of customers, they will, “Wait a minute, you didn’t–you never said I can do that.” Well, you never told us what you were doing, for one. So, you know, we had a WAN environment. This is more just information to help you on your side to be better prepared when you’re doing the turn up and design of your WAN infrastructure and how the LAN plays a big part in that design phase.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, especially if you’re setting up, you know, like you said the backup to an MPLS network and then you’re thinking, you know, you really got to think through how is it going to fail over, you know, and how is it gonna be seamless. If you’re using a third party provider to seamlessly, you know, fail over that MPLS network or other WAN network and your fit for that matter, it’s just that–I think that whole seamless part is where I think there’s a–there’s a lot of hiccups because like you said if you’re using the same provider for both then obviously, yeah, that’s all on that, you know, on that provider. But typically, you’re not because that kind of kills some of the, you know, so called redundancy.

Jose: Yeah, yup.

Mike: You’re using that third party. You know, using, “Hey, we have a 4G, you know, DIA or–not DIA, we have a 4G connection at all the sites that we’re filling over our MPLS to.” Great. But how is that gonna happen seamlessly without a hitch and you get–you really got to get all those heads together from the different parties both your LAN and both different service providers to really figure that out, I think.

Jose: Yeah, and it takes multiple meetings. One of the big turn ups we just finished last month was just that we had multiple meetings on the redundancy piece. The WAN piece goes smoothly. Those things happen. But when you start going in redundancy and it was neat because in several different instances I’ve been at the turn up environment and we’ve actually unplug routers to make sure that they fail over to the – whatever they’re using for third party, their DIA or broadband or even 4G. And we measure how long it takes for the redundancy to happen, so the replication. And we–when we were using 4G, I think it took us five seconds to unplug a router, pull the Ethernet switch out, Ethernet cable out and within five seconds it was back up on 4G. And then we pull out the router back in and in 3 seconds it’s back up on the regular MPLS Map which was phenomenal. We’re like, “Wow, that works great.” And we’ve done it with broadband, we’ve done with DIA. So if the design is correct up front, it’s stuff down the street, just like painting. It’s all prep.

Mike: [inaudible] 0:40:38

Jose: Sore subject there.

Mike: I’ve done my share of painting. I hire painters nowadays. But it’s like–oh, man. You’re right, it’s like so much proper but yeah, just goes to show if you don’t wanna do the proper work just like painting, hire someone who’s gonna do the proper work for you. Who’s gonna come in and think through all the possible ways that that’s not gonna work especially to you. I mean, I’ve heard, you know, so many multiple service providers. I’ve heard service providers say, “Yeah, we can fill it over but we can’t fill it back.” They’ll say like, you know, if your MPLS fails over, if you’re gonna bring in a third party, we can fail it to the third party but, you know, the thing that a lot of time people will tell you is that, you know, for that particular provider they might say, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to manually get it back to your MPLS network.” You know, once your MPLS network is back [inaudible] 0:41:27 because our filler doesn’t fill back to it automatically. That’s something–that’s a manual thing. So like even little catches like rat, I think are pretty common.

Jose: Yeah, because if you think about it, let’s say you’re running, let’s say you’re running a supermarket and back in my data center days I work for Ralph’s Grocery in their data center, and literally I was working swing shifts on the times of graveyard but then the data center is always moving. But if you’re, you know, you’re downloading stuff inventory from stores in the middle of the night or because traffic is light but if you–if you fail over to something and it doesn’t fail over back and next thing you know you go back and you’ve been a week on 4G, you’re like, “Whoa, where did cost metric go to now?” Because I mean, you pretty much a wireless. You’re like, “Holy cow,” so, yeah, that’s a very great example of being in-cognizant aware of what the whole network does and how it works.

Mike: Absolutely. Cool. Is that all the stuff? I don’t wanna cut you off now.

Jose: No, no. That’s pretty much all the examples I had if you, you know, if you want more information I could, you know, bring up some other stuff, I guess, but yeah, that’s pretty much it. I pretty much just wanted to make sure everybody understands what they can do with DIA and different applications within running DMZ or they can, you know, partition out things and things like that. So just–that’s pretty much it.

Mike: Very cool. All right. Well, let’s take a break from the serious stuff and get to some good stories. So this is the part of the show I like to turn it over to the guest and to just tell us, you know, a funny story or great story, inspiring or just weird story but, you know, we were all in work environment so much that I think, you know, when we sit down to share the thing we’ve seen it’s pretty interesting. So, yeah, Jose tell us about the funniest or strangest or coolest thing that’s ever happened to you in the workplace or one of them at least.

Jose: Okay. So one of them that just stands out, at one point in my career, I was running the telecommunications part, a data center. And it was a pretty much, you know, small same as the loan service bureau. But we had–I wanna say, back in the day, probably 2,000 circuits that we’re maintaining and monitoring along with 5,000 ATMs. And at one point we have this one branch that was constantly going down and we’re like, “What’s going on? It goes down and it comes right back up after about 10 minutes. This is weird. Get the guys up, get the telco involved.” Telco, “Hey, we test fine.” Go out there, everything looks good. We’re like, “Oh, man, what is going on?” Happens for two weeks straight and we’re like–this branch have been working flawlessly. Well, finally, we heard we were getting fed up, so it was happening every day. I send a technician out, go out to the prim and he’s walking around there and I’m gonna call them as soon as it happens. And he’s sitting around there in the back, either router nothing is happening. Olsen, I call him up, I go, “Hey, what’s happening right now?” He’s like, “Oh my god, look at it. It just went red. Holy cow.” Okay. He’s looking around, nothing weird. Nothing weird. He looks at the interface, everything’s fine. It’s like, you know, on the Ethernet, it’s like what is going on. And then he hears this ding. Like what the–goes in–goes in the next room, from the closet, from the telco’s, goes in the next room. And he sees this lady pulling out the food out of the microwave. So he’s like, “Oh, no. It couldn’t be that easy.” It couldn’t just–he says–he go, he called, he tells me, “Okay. Is it backed up?” I go, “Yeah, it’s back up.” So, guy goes back and he goes, “Okay. Tell me if it goes down now. He just puts the microwave on for about 3 minutes and I’m like, “Hey, it just went down.” And he goes, “Ah-hah!” Traces back the cabling. Apparently they had just gotten a new microwave and there wasn’t enough–there wasn’t enough outlets in the little lunchroom for the new microwave so they ran an extension cord and plug it right next to the router plug in. So we talked to the branch manager who’s like, “What’s going on here?” He goes, “Yeah. We did with the microwave because, you know, this is clean tower for your network, right?” He goes, “What does that mean?” He goes, “You can’t plug in microwaves into this.” So that was my thing that just kind of sticks out of my head like there’s no tomorrows like, “Okay.” So that was–that’s my funny little antidote story. It was–but it cost so much havoc just by having the microwave.

Mike: Oh, man. That’s great. What’s funny that reminds me of the story when I was actually, you know, when I just started our company, it’s about 13 years ago. You know, and I came from XO. So, you know, so first provider I sold lot of was XO and I sold XO to a cousin, a family member. So mistake number 1. Never sell anything to your family member. The pressure is way too great for it go well. So my cousin, you know, their company has some integrated access circuit to them so they have voice data on the same circuit. It’s just a single T1, is that maybe 20, 30 people in the office but this is 13 years ago. So they could get by on a T1, believe it or not. Using both wasting data on it but so, and they kept going down and right when we installed it, they kept going down, you know, consistently and some calling up XO and, Guys, I call on my friends there that, you know, that I could think of to try to help me out and try to get this fixed. And it just–they just kept having outages and they would be like, you know, random times and it was just going on for like a week. Finally, I was like, “You guys, like, you’ve got to go out there again.” Like XO would come out, look, you know, couldn’t find the problem, would leave, and they continue to go down. And so I’m like, “Listen, guys, this is a [inaudible] 0:47:32 get oout there and fix it. I don’t care what you do. If something is going on, it is on you. It’s on you”. You know, who knows,” I would say, “Maybe you’re getting involved with it.”

Jose: Yeah. Oh, I’ve got a phone call right now.

Mike: Yeah. So you tell them like, “Come on,” so that finally comes to find out in it they figured it out long story short, the integrated access device was plugged in to an outlet that was controlled by the light switch. Oh, god, are you kidding me? Oh, man. I was like, I didn’t–but at that point, I’m like, “Well, I don’t know if the XO technician plugged it in or my cousin’s company plugged it in. I didn’t know who to blame but I’m like, you know, first of all, you know, in the–in the phone closet or data center room or whatever, what is–why is there an outlet that’s controlled by a light switch?

Jose: Exactly.

Mike: Are you putting a torch lamp in there or something? What’s going on? What–is there–are you putting a lamp in there? Wait, why would you do that? And so that must have been old wiring from previous tenant or something, I don’t know. Who knows? But yeah, I was like–like I said, I–we just–I think nobody knew who to blame so we all just kinda silently said, “Okay.”

Jose: It’s fixed.

Mike: It’s fixed. All right. I don’t–you know, let’s just–let’s all walk away, embarrassed that, you know, we don’t know if that was us or them or whoever but yeah…

Jose: But those type of things that, you know, it makes you stronger down the line that, you know, they make you stronger down the line. The, oh boy, okay, make sure that this isn’t  done like this or done like this that you go through all your trunks and balance it. Yeah.

Mike: Where is it plugged in? Where is it plugged in and what’s plugged in next to it? You know, check out all these silly things like, yeah, you know so. From that point on, I mean it’s almost bad though. Did I know that because if a customer is having outages, it just–I feel like a real moron asking them that question. But I’m like, you know, especially because they’re usually really ticked off right around that time like I know this sounds crazy but it’s not plugged in any control by light switch, is it? And you’re like, “No, you idiot.”

Jose: What are you crazy?

Mike: Like that’s your level of technical expertise, that’s your solution? Come on, man.

Jose: You know what’s funny? Maybe somebody will check that and they’re like, “Oh, man. And then they’ll never have a problem.”

Mike: Just switch it out real quick and just say that it magically got fixed we don’t know why.

Jose: Exactly. Yeah.

Mike: Cool.

Jose: It’s great. Some of the stories you hear. I mean, there’s–yeah, there’s a lot of them but yeah, so that’s what I got, Mike.

Mike: I like it. I like it. So, okay, well, tell us a little bit about XO and, you know, if there’s people listening who haven’t heard of XO–I mean, there’s quite a few of them out there but, you know, I know XO from having gotten Mike for a start there, you know, back in 1999 there. I know there’s been constant improvements and changes and modifications, you know, with an XO’s product portfolio so I know that the XO I knew in ’99 is definitely a lot. There is actually Nextlink at the time but the XO that’s today, you know, like tell us about what’s going on that’s exciting over there and what do you guys do really well?

Jose: Okay. So, yeah. So XO, you know, this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. So back in ’96, it became a company and we celebrated a 20-year milestone in July. So great news airing. Yeah, we have come up with a complete different company in a way it’s already–the way we provide our platforms and things like that. Some of the new stuff that, you know, that people aren’t aware of is we do run an MPLS network, that’s our core. We run a separate VoIP network with sauna switches so we run our own network itself. Part of the bigger pieces right now we’re doing is lot of cloud infrastructure stuff. So we run a whole hosted PBX platform with our broad socks which is in the cloud. So customers can just have phones out of their prim with POE switches and never have to worry about having an IP network or anything like that. They can make changes via portal no matter where they’re at with internet access. They don’t even have to be at that branch. They can control everything from call center on demand if applications within that hosted PBX platform so lot of good stuff as far as value add from the IPP–from the hosted PBX arena which, you know, it’s good for companies right now because they don’t have to worry about administrative cost within their IP PBX, any changes that need to be made they have to pay for another technician to come out to make those changes on their IP PBX that they don’t have. In-house services are already paying for salary employees to do. So this is one of those great things. It’s just phones–we–you have a set budget that cost them go up or down based on what’s going on. If there’s an issue with something within the cloud, we fix it. If a phone breaks, we fix it. So that’s a great thing to have especially for companies that are, you know, they’re not–they’re not super big or they have a lot of different stores, you know. We have a retail right now that’s using them that having great success. They got rid of all their little call center, their little, I should say, key switches at all their little stores that they had and they just run hosted PBX. So you couple that with our hosted security platform that’s also cloud base, that’s even–that’s a–I mean, they both working great tandem there. If you have the MPLS network already in your infrastructure, we just overlaid each PBX, the seamless way to do it as well as the hosted security platform because you don’t need separate access lines to run MPLS and host the PBX or host its security. Everything runs MPLS and everything is in the cloud so everything is in our core. So, you know, there’s a lot of companies also that are using AWS, that’s a big huge thing. Amazon web services right now. Everybody wants to get the Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure. So we already have accessibility within our core MPLS network so if you need to access the either one of those platforms and you’re already an XO customer, boom, you could just say, “Hey, I need access to this AWS platform.” Boom, we provide a port and you go right into the network. So there’s a lot of great stuff with unified communication and business continuity coming with XO right now. So I think that’s what’s great about what we’re doing. And, you know, it is out network, it is our equipment.  We control everything ourselves so it’s [inaudible] 0:54:23, you know, it’s come a long way from back in the days so it’s the future of telecom right now.

Mike: Yeah, I think that–you know, the thing I know about XO is that, you know, XO has always been on the cutting edge who have come out with new technologies and things that. You know, I remember, I think it was probably like 2000-2001, we rolled up hosted VoIP and it was like, “What?” we rolled it out for about six months and then roll it right back in. But, you know, and we also like hosted exchange, we did as well and things that, you know, at the time like our salespeople are trying to wrap our brain around these things. Like because cloud stuff really wasn’t–I mean that was before cloud stuff really started coming out. So it was, you know, hosted VoIP, they’re trying to explain this to us and how we’d sell it and we’re like, “What the heck? I don’t understand.” Like, you know, like we implemented hosted VoIP internally in our office as an agency in 2005 and then we were like, you know, early adaptors at that point. 2005, this was like five years before that. And it was like–yeah, I remember they rolled it out and one of our engineers who would be [inaudible] 0:55:30 from engineer to sales rep. He was really smart guy. He was like one of the only persons who sold it, the only salespeople who sold it. And he was on the phone nonstop trying to get it to work. And that, you know, that’s a cool thing because I always feel like I wasn’t really blessed to land at XO randomly because I just started interviewing at telecom companies and randomly I got a job at XO. And it’s really, you know, just–I would have taken any job at that point but, you know, I ended up there but I mean, we had so many products when I first got there. We just sold just analog phone lines, that was it. And, you know, and the long distance was too expensive to sale so we didn’t sell it. And then we rolled out, you know, everybody thought we want a DSL and we rolled out T1 and then we bought Concentrix and then it was–and then it turned into XO and, you know, from there it’s just, you know, one product for the next like XO keeps on adding cool stuff. So I think that that’s a cool thing about XO is that, you know, they’ve always got a lot of really good products that, you know, that a lot of providers might be a little slow to adapt but I think XO does for the most part, you know, rolls out good stuff. Now I think from what I’ve seen one of the cool thing XO that I’ve seen is that they’d really kinda niche down to midsize businesses. I think that’s something I’ve seen over the last few years. Is that something that XO still focusing on, Jose from your standpoint is like maybe 50 users and above is really their sweet spot, you know, kinda getting away from the small business stuff. And a lot of their products are kinda more focused on those little bit–little bit bigger companies. Not huge but, you know, 1500 users and above that seems to be the sweet spot of the products nowadays.

Jose: Yeah, that’s exactly where the, you know, it’s in the enterprise market now that we’re planning to part in. And, yeah, that’s where this cloud infrastructure products just plays a great part because you have companies that don’t have enough–they don’t have enough revenue to bring in the talent that they need to run their PBX platform or run their back office security firewalls and these cloud product sets–I mean they really help the midsize company there because they don’t have to have a secondary group just monitoring and managing that whole thing. We do it for them and they can actually access everything via portals now, reporting, alerts, things like that. So it’s really–it’s really filling in that sweet spot. Like you said it’s working for that group and it works well. I mean, we do have our national account infrastructure that has the big huge corporations that do have their back office, you know, networking and stuff but they’re playing more in the MPLS arena with using their own VoIP SIP platform but like you said the mid-market right there, enterprise market is where this is really doing real well and just growing exponentially every day.

Mike: Yeah. So if any of you have experience with XO and it was a while back, you know, that might be something you might wanna revisit or if you’re mid-level, you know, mid-market company because I tell you, if you look at XO’s products now, they’ve really niche down and they’re doing a fantastic job with products and services that cater specifically to midmarket companies. So it’s a lot different company that you saw probably six, seven years ago or five years ago even. So I think, you know, that’s the continued evolution that I’ve seen but yeah, like I said if you haven’t–if you haven’t checked out XO recently and you’re mid-market company definitely check out what they’re doing because, you know, I know firsthand that they have some stuff that nobody else has that really caters to that market because they’re not focusing on a little 1C, 2C, T1’s anymore. So, yeah. Well, cool. Thanks for joining us today, Jose. It’s been great talking to you and, you know, thanks for carving out the time. I think that everybody have learned a little bit today and that’s always the goal, just learn a little bit more every day. So I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jose: Thanks a lot, Mike. Any time you want me to join, just give me a ring. Loved it.

Mike: Will do. Have a great day. I’ll take you up on that so get ready tomorrow? Yeah? Are we good.

Jose: Yeah, we’ll talk soon.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. We need to. Cool. All right. Thank, Jose. Have a great day.

Jose: All right, Mike. See you later.

Mike: Well, I hope you enjoyed Jose as much as I enjoyed talking to him. And as always if anybody wants to get in touch with Jose, just reach out to us at the podcast. Just email podcast.Aerocominc.com and we can get you in touch with Jose, arrange a conference call if you have any questions for him, anything like that we would be happy to accommodate it.

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And last but not least, make sure you stop by our website and check out the transcripts of this show if you miss anything. Don’t feel like you have to scramble, taking notes on any of our shows. We have the transcripts. We actually pay for these to be done on every single episode, every single week. Just go to Aerocominc.com/info/blog and then find the episode you’re looking and we have the full transcripts of every single show so that’s a gift for you guys as well.

All right. Well, have a great day out there. Be successful and learn something new every single day and we will talk to you next time.

IT nation, thank you for joining us on Cloud Therapy with Aerocominc.com. Visit us Aerocominc.com, that’s A-E-R-O-C-O-M-I-N-C,.com and head on over to the blog section for notes on everything we talked about today as well as our blogs provider reviews and of course the best quotes for any technology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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