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Lightstream Awarded the Palo Alto Networks Public Cloud Partner of the Year for 2019

Salt Lake City, UT, October 15, 2019 – Lightstream, a leader in cloud security, network integration, and managed services, today announced it received the Palo Alto Networks Public Cloud Partner of the Year Award for 2019.

Announced during the Palo Alto Networks Sales Kickoff 2020 in Las Vegas, these annual awards are presented to an elite group of NextWave partners that over the past 12 months have excelled in the following areas:

  • Performance: partner-initiated bookings, pipeline and net new customer acquisition
  •  Enablement: number of Palo Alto Networks pre-sales, sales and post-sales certifications
  •  Engagement: nominated by the Palo Alto Networks team

Lightstream specializes in the integration of architecture between customer data centers, cloud solutions, and network service providers for both commercial and government organizations. The company has received recognition for excellence in delivering public cloud cybersecurity solutions two consecutive years. In 2018, Lightstream received the NextWave Specialized Cloud Partner of the year award.

“We are honored to be named Public Cloud Partner of the Year by Palo Alto Networks for the second year running,” said Rod Stout, president at Lightstream. “This speaks to the strength of our expanding collaboration and our joint mission to help our customers protect their applications and data deployed in public and hybrid cloud platforms with Palo Alto Networks innovative and comprehensive security solutions.”

“We are fully committed to helping our partners secure the enterprise, cloud, and future together,” said Karl Soderlund, senior vice president of Worldwide Channel Sales at Palo Alto Networks. “Today’s customers need trusted advisors, our NextWave partners, to successfully navigate the rapidly changing and complex security landscape. We’re proud to recognize Lightstream on their Public Cloud Partner of the Year award for delivering valuable business outcomes and helping our mutual customers protect their digital way of life.”

For more information on Lightstream, please visit www.lightstream.tech. For more information on Palo Alto Networks, please visit this page.

About Lightstream

Founded in 2003 as a wide-area network services company, Lightstream has grown to become a leader in cloud security, network integration, and managed services. Lightstream specializes in the integration of architecture between customer data centers, cloud solutions, and network service providers for both commercial and government organizations.

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Lightstream Announces Partnership with Armor
to Strengthen Security-First Approach
for Customers’ Cloud Migration Journey

Salt Lake City, UT, June 26: Lightstream, a global leader in cloud technology solutions, network integration and managed-network services, today announced a strategic partnership with Armor to expand its managed security offering using Armor’s advanced cloud and on-premise security-as-a-service solutions. The joint offering provides customers with best-of-breed solutions and security outcomes that enable businesses to be proactive, meet stringent compliance demands and stay ahead of cyber threats in multicloud and on-premise environments.

Lightstream’s managed security offering provides comprehensive cloud security through a flexible mix of consulting, integration and managed services. Built to support secure cloud deployments on major platforms such as AWS and Azure, the offering uses a proven methodology that ensures cybersecurity, risk and compliance requirements are incorporated into a customer’s architecture and company culture, and utilized through the lifecycle and dynamics of their cloud deployment.

Armor strengthens this offering by including 24/7/365 access to their Security Operations Center (SOC) team, in addition to threat detection and response, security analytics and orchestration, and incident response and forensics. The partnership enables Lightstream to rapidly meet customers’ cybersecurity needs with a service bundle that also reduces Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

“We are seeing a significant shift in the market with the convergence of cloud and cybersecurity,” said Mark Woodard, Armor Chief Executive Officer. “As businesses move from hosting their data workloads on-premise to hosting them in the cloud or in hybrid environments, data security and compliance can become more challenging for organizations, as it requires a different security skill set. Our partnership with Lightstream helps bring a holistic approach to a company’s security program by providing these skills as part of a comprehensive pay-as-you-scale offering.”

“We are pleased to incorporate Armor’s extensive security services into our managed security offering,” said Jeff Collins, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightstream. “As more and more customers embrace a cloud-first strategy, companies must focus on building a solid foundation by uncovering the strategies, requirements and transformational elements that support a secure cloud environment. Lightstream and Armor makes this possible by pairing consultative security and integration services with best-of-breed technologies and real-time security protection that is unrivaled in the industry.”

To learn more about the partnership, watch this video with Lightstream’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Collins and Armor’s Vice President of Security, Rafal Los.

About LightstreamFounded in 2003 as a wide-area network services company, Lightstream has grown to become a leader in cloud technology solutions, network integration, and managed network services. With corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City, Lightstream has sales and service offices throughout the United States.

About Armor

Armor is a global cloud security company that takes the complexity out of protecting your data, whether it resides in a private, public, or hybrid cloud—or in an on-premise IT environment. We provide managed security solutions that give you a clear picture of threats facing your organization. This allows us to provide you with the people and security resources to stop attacks before they happen and react quickly and effectively when they do, keeping your data safe and compliant. Wherever you are on your cloud journey, Armor can help. We make cybersecurity simple. To learn more,  www.armor.com follow @armor on Twitter. To learn more, visit  www.armor.com or follow @armor on Twitter.

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AWS Cloud Migration:
A Checklist for a Successful Journey

Progressive enterprises understand that migrating their business applications to the cloud is no longer a question of “if,” but “when.” If you’re ready to make the move with AWS, the benefits are clear:  It drives business value.  Customers that migrate to AWS can experience a 20% drop in the costs of operations, while increasing IT staff productivity by 29% with 69% reductions in downtime.

Still, for IT professionals at these organizations, the task can seem daunting or flat-out intimidating.

That’s why it’s crucial for businesses to have a well-planned strategy in order to execute a smooth and successful transition to AWS.

Lightstream’s Cloud Foundation helps ensure this strategy is in place with a blueprint for cloud adoption that discovers and analyzes your environment to ensure your AWS cloud readiness.

Lightstream is also certified to deliver an AWS Well-Architected Review that includes strategies to help you compare your workloads against best practices and obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems.

To be sure, everything works smoother when there is a roadmap to follow. Use this AWS migration checklist to help you get started:

 1. Target internal stakeholder buy-in early in the process

The more knowledgeable your teams are around AWS, the smoother the transition; the more internal evangelists you have on your side, the easier it will be to break down barriers. This process needs to happen early in the journey, before you make organizational-wide decisions on the future state of your IT landscape in AWS.

Lightstream’s Cloud Foundation has a thorough process for tackling adoption and ensuring your key stakeholders are on board.

2. Clarify the AWS account governance and billing processes

With AWS, you can have one master account or several accounts linked to each other. Many companies use separate accounts for different purposes (security versus administration, for example). Your choice depends on how you want your operation to function in the cloud. You can also segregate billing services to isolate specific costs per function or consolidate them into one. AWS offers flexible pricing options (on demand versus spot instances) that can change based on how you engage the cloud capacities.

To simplify the process even more, Lightstream offers Lightstream Connect as part of our Cloud Managed Services. Lightstream Connect offers a single pane of glass into your AWS spend and consolidates your orders, service inventory, usage and analytics in one place.

3. Assess security and access needs

Cloud computing requires constant access to cloud servers. To stay secure, you must adopt current, rigorous security practices and document your security requirements in the planning process.

AWS offers a series of access credential options so you can choose how to best manage your corporate security practices in AWS servers. Some of these include console passwords, symmetric access keys and multi-factor authentication tools.

Lightstream offers an AWS Cybersecurity Framework built on proven methodologies that takes the guesswork out of assessing your security needs and ensures your requirements are incorporated into your architecture.

4. Manage cloud-based assets

Plugging into the AWS cloud gives you access to the service-related metadata. You can combine your proprietary assets with the AWS cloud.

However, merging two separate sets of digital operations can be complex.

Amazon suggests developing an internal resource tagging strategy to clarify identification of proprietary resources and ease the integration with AWS resources.

Lightstream offer Reserved Instances management and tagging as part of our AWS Optimization and Containment Services.  We will help you create a unique tagging strategy, continuously align and optimize Reserved Instances and improve security- and network-related issues.

 5. Automate

The cloud’s agility is realized through automation. Spend time revisiting processes and establishing new ones that can take advantage of it as you migrate. If not all of your aspects can be automated, carefully determine which ones can, and empower your team to do so.

Be sure to keep in mind, though,  that if you’re going to automate, do it from the beginning. Add it in as early as possible and keep iterating. Automation does require extra effort so it’s important not to automate for automation’s sake.

Lightstream Cloud Foundation helps you make these types of determinations through our visualization and discovery processes that help your organization determine what types of technologies and approaches your organization will embrace and how to they will best work with your current environment.

6. Disaster Recovery (DR) and Backup Considerations

Planning for disaster reduces its impact. The AWS cloud offers DR options that will ensure your applications can recover when they fail and testing to confirm they’re functional after recovery has completed.

At a minimum, AWS recommends your DR strategy addresses global traffic management, regional redundancies, load-balancing and monitoring

7. Leverage Service-Provider Support

A good support team can be a critical ally during any cloud migration project. Cloud support staff are experts in the particular service they work for and they will be able to promptly answer technical questions or help you with any issues you have.

Look to Lightstream to be your trusted partner for AWS Migration and Management. We’ll help you implement Amazon EC2, Amazon Chime, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 and many more.

To get started with a free AWS managed services consultation, contact us.

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Lightstream Joins Select Lineup of AWS-Recognized Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partners

Lightstream was chosen today by AWS as part of a select group of Service Delivery Partners certified to deliver Amazon Connect contact center solutions to customers.

Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost. It’s based on the same contact center technology used by 70,000 Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations.

The AWS Service Delivery Program identifies and endorses APN Partners with validated customer experience and a deep understanding of specific AWS services, such as Amazon Connect. These top APN Partners follow best practices for implementing AWS services and have proven success delivering AWS services to end customers.

Many companies that manage contact center operations expend much of their effort just keeping the infrastructure running. It takes time to develop specialized skills, attract and retain staff, and manage the procurement of software licenses and IT equipment that are complex, generally proprietary, and often not focused on helping customers.

As an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner, Lightstream is ready to help you with an end-to-end contact center solution. Through our unique engagement model, we’ll envision, design, and help you implement an Amazon Connect solution that’s right for you, including ongoing management and support services to keep your customer care center operating optimally.

For example, Lightstream can provide an analysis of your current on-prem contact center, discuss current and future state requirements and map those to Amazon Connect. There are over 300 ISV partners building solutions that integrate with Amazon Connect, and we have deep skills in help identifying those that will provide new capabilities for your Cloud Contact Center.

Our team can integrate into your existing software development and DevOps processes and our team of certified CISSP experts will ensure your environment is secure and complies with your company’s cybersecurity policies.

Receiving an AWS Service Delivery designation for Amazon Connect is a high level of recognition by AWS of a partner’s skills for the AWS environment. APN Partners have gone through a service validation to verify they have successfully implemented Amazon Connect for customers and followed AWS best practices for the service.

If you’re ready to get started with Amazon Connect, ask us about a funded Proof of Concept for your organization.