Primus Business Services Partners with Juniper and NetApp

On the heels of the recent expansion of their managed services team that included the addition of four new professionals, Primus Business Services has announced they are enhancing their managed services portfolio by partnering with Juniper Networks, Inc. and NetApp. These new partnerships will now make two technologies available to the small and mid-sized business community.

Partnering with Juniper will enable Primus to offer Juniper’s SSG series product line which includes their integrated set of best-in-class Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewall features. Among the features the firewall offers are protection against inbound and outbound attacks at all levels, antivirus (anti-spyware, anti-phishing, anti-adware), anti-spam, and Web filtering, integrated routing and a variety of LAN/WAN interface options offering the ability to consolidate devices and reduce IT expenditures, rapid deployment to quickly streamline widely distributed deployments while controlling OPEX, management through graphical Web UI, CLI, or NSM central management system and policy-based management to allow centralized, end-to-end life-cycle management.

"IT managers at companies of all sizes – small, mid-size or large – can’t afford to leave their networks vulnerable by focusing only on protection against a single type of attack," said Jeff Lorenz, VP Sales & Marketing at Primus Telecommunications Canada. "Our partnership with Juniper enables smaller and mid-sized businesses to outsource their firewall service and enjoy secure, 24/7 management and monitoring of their firewall devices at a fraction of the cost of doing it themselves."

"Juniper’s relationship with Primus Telecommunications Canada is an excellent example of how we are working with customers to provide them with innovative services that respond to their current and future needs," says Tim Lambie, Vice President, Americas International, Canada, Caribbean and Latin America, Juniper Networks. "Primus is leveraging Juniper’s high-performance network infrastructure to drive security and threat monitoring to one of Canada’s most important businesses markets – small and medium sized companies. Through Juniper firewalls, Primus will ensure that its SMB customers conduct all mission critical transactions over the Internet safely and securely."

With the increase in frequency and sophistication of Internet attacks, firewall protection is essential for all businesses connecting their servers or office networks to the Internet. Primus recognizes that security needs differ greatly from one organization to another and that the security requirements of small and mid-size business environments vary greatly from large, multi-server or multi-office organizations. As such, Primus offers a number of different Managed Firewall packages which meet the needs of all organizations. Primus’ security experts work with companies to determine their security needs and configure and deploy a firewall tailored to those needs. Primus monitors and maintains each firewall on an on-going basis and provides monthly reports summarizing the intrusion attempts which were blocked by the firewall.

Primus’ partnership with NetApp will greatly improve business continuity for the SMB market. By leveraging NetApp’s SnapVault and OSSV technology, Primus will be able to provide their clients with the most up-to-date technology in data recovery services. SnapVault has been designed to safeguard data faster and more cost effectively and to leverage disk-based backup and block-level incrementals for reliable, low-overhead backup and recovery. With SnapVault, data protection occurs at the block level, copying only the data blocks that have changed since the last backup, not entire files. This enables backups to run more frequently and utilize less capacity because no redundant data must be moved or stored. This not only makes disk-based backup more cost effective, it provides the option of backing up directly from remote facilities to a core data centre, centralizing management and minimizing investment needs.

"Small and mid-sized businesses will now be able to reap the operational and financial benefits that come as a result of Primus’ managed business continuity services," said Jeff Lorenz. "Companies lose valuable time and millions of dollars each year due to lost data and Primus is pleased that our partnership with NetApp will help smaller and mid-sized businesses improve their backup and recovery speeds by up to 92%, enable more cost effective backups and further simplify all aspects of their data protection with the SnapVault option."

"As a long time NetApp customer, Primus is intimate with our technology and the value it brings to data management," said Jeff Goldstein, Canadian General Manager for NetApp. "They have chosen to partner with NetApp to deliver differentiated solutions to the Canadian marketplace and to bring NetApp Data Protection capabilities to small and medium size businesses with the same data protection requirements as larger organizations but without the dedicated storage administration staff. Primus’ managed data capability will provide a valuable service to the SMB market looking to protect their valuable data assets and we are proud to be partnering with Primus and delivering these solutions to the Canadian marketplace."

Primus’ managed business continuity services encompass retention of all data to meet a specific business’ requirements, backups that can be restored to any server in any environment, offsite storage of backups for disaster recovery purposes, private secure network for backup system, 24/7 access to a support team for file restores and hardware and connectivity redundancy for 100% up-time.