PTP Solves: How AWS Direct Connect Powers Fast, Secure Cloud Data for Biotech

I often tell my (now adult) children that many of life’s most impactful lessons are learned the hard way. Well, in 20+ years of leading managed services I’ve learned plenty the hard way, and I’d like to think—despite the scars—that I and the services I influence at PTP are better off for it. Since today is my birthday (please, hold your applause until the end), it felt like a good time to reflect and share some of those lessons in hopes that they provide value to others.

Lesson 1: Services, Not Engineering
It’s called Managed Services for a reason—not Managed Engineering, Managed Technician, or Managed Analyst. Hire people who have the skills to perform the job well, but also look for those with empathy, business awareness, and a deep commitment to customer satisfaction. Well-written scopes of work matter, but going above and beyond is what renews contracts. This is especially true for teams delivering managed IT services for life sciences companies where stakes are often high.

Lesson 2: No “MSP” Can Do It All
If they say they can, run. Fast. I once heard a client say that MSPs grow until they stop performing well. Often, their early success comes from a few brilliant people who can handle everything—until they can’t. The model breaks under scale. A strong IT managed service provider for life sciences, or any industry, knows how to say no for the right reasons and focuses on operational efficiency through a well-defined tech stack.

Lesson 3: Offshore is Cheaper, Not Better
Offshore teams can be part of a smart strategy—but only in limited roles. I’ve seen it work best during night/weekend support or for repetitive tasks that follow clear runbooks. Especially for biotech IT support or scientific research MSP services, clients deserve teams that know their environment, systems, and compliance requirements. The real value comes when escalation paths lead back to experienced, knowledgeable engineers who understand the client’s unique needs.

Lesson 4: Transparency and Openness
Never hide metrics or lock clients out of their tools. If a managed services team fears client visibility, that’s a red flag. Trust is the foundation of every relationship—whether personal or professional. Say what you do, do what you say, and show what you do. That level of openness is what separates average MSPs from those who earn long-term loyalty in sectors like life sciences compliance and security management.

Lesson 5: Drive for Show, Putt for Dough
Yes, it’s a golf metaphor. “Driving” in this case refers to 24×7 monitoring, alerting, and incident management. It’s necessary, it’s complex, and it’s table stakes. But it’s not what renews contracts. That comes from the “putting”—the forward-looking reviews and strategic guidance. These sessions help clients improve systems, optimize operations, and plan for the future. For MSPs serving clinical research or regulated labs, these reviews are where the real business value is proven.

Nobody has all the answers—I certainly don’t. But most of the lessons I’ve shared here weren’t taught to me; I had to live them. And every misstep has shaped how we execute today. We’re not perfect, but our clients know they’re supported by a team that works hard, performs at a high level, and puts them first.

By Gary Derheim
VP of Marketing & Business Development

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OpsRamp, a leader in Digital IT Operations Management, profiled PTP in an edition of their Transformational Tales to share how the platform and its AIOps capabilities allow PTP to deliver value to its customers.  OpsRamp invited Rick Pitcairn, VP of Managed Services and Gary Derheim, VP of Marketing and Business Development to share their experience and insight from a combined 30+ years in Managed Services.  In addition to sharing a bit about PTP’s business, Rick and Gary discussed what led PTP to modernize it’s IT Operations Management platform, PTP’s key solution requirements, how PTP is enabling its customers with IT transformation, and advice for other service providers.

More about AIOPs and Managed Services from PTP!

• AIOPs panel discussion with PTP and OpsRamp
• PTP Customer Case Studies

PTP’s PeakPlus Managed Services have been developed to augment the network, cloud, datacenter, and security engineering resources of our customers and to provide management, monitoring and maintenance deliverables with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by our team of highly-experienced and certified engineers. We are a Cisco Cloud and Managed Services and AWS Life Sciences Competency audited and accredited services team providing services based on the ITIL v4 service framework and doing so with an exceptionally high Net Promoter Score with the mission to improve service levels and reduce risk.

The PeakPlus Managed Services Platform
Our team has assembled a platform of tools enable our customer’s investment in information technology infrastructure, both on-prem and in the cloud. Our team of seasoned Managed Services experts have tuned these tools to deliver the information necessary to operate their environments through dashboards and both detailed and executive reporting. We are transparent and provide full access to customers who wish to work in the tools. Our platform includes OpsRamp for IT Operations Management (ITOM), Cherwell for IT Service Management (ITSM), CloudCheckr for Cloud Optimziation and Management, the PeakPlus View portal, in addition to other integrated point tools for visibility and security.

By Nolan Harvey, Cloud Networking Engineer, PTP

In the middle of 2020, I was asked to complete the AWS Advanced Networking Specialty. Knowing other colleagues who have taken the exam to earn the certification, I knew this would be no easy task. I immediately began doing research to find the best study materials and set off on the seemingly daunting task of preparing for the exam. You may be asking yourself as you read this…. why write about it? Well, my goal in writing this is to share my experience and what worked for me to successfully pass the exam and maybe in turn the information will be helpful to someone going through the process right now or to someone preparing for cloud certification. So here it goes……

Before I start studying for an exam, I typically do research online to see what kind of experience other people have had with the exam I am preparing to take. During my research, I found a blog from someone who had passed every other AWS exam and was describing their challenging experience with the Advanced Networking exam. Not exactly what I wanted to read/see right out of the gate, but the first thing came across in his post was the following quote accompanied with the below image he had created to show the breadth and difficulty of each AWS exam.

“In my opinion, this exam is by far the hardest out of all AWS certifications, easily surpassing the Big Data Specialty or Solutions Architect Professional certifications for difficulty.”

As you can imagine I was not feeling overly enthusiastic about the road ahead or the prospect of completing the exam. Now for the glass half full guy perspective… I have a good amount of traditional networking experience and I also hold the AWS solutions architect associate certification. So, I felt that maybe I had a bit of a leg up on this exam but knew I would have dig in and start somewhere so I decided to take the advanced networking specialty course on A Cloud Guru. With a series of training videos, I like to take notes while I watch them and then take snapshots of useful images from the videos to be able to reference later. After I completed the course, I ended up with 44 notepad files worth of notes and 16 images for topics like extreme hybrid network scenarios, hybrid DNS, VPC peering, transient gateways, and direct connect.

Once I finished the A Cloud Guru course, my next step was to look for good practice exams. I had one I used before when I took the exam the first time, yeah you heard that right, I did not pass the first time, but remember I said this would be challenging and while writing this I didn’t feel the need to discourage anyone from taking or bore them with my first time failure experiences, so I am focused on what it took to reach a positive outcome. Anyway, I did not find the first set of practice exams very useful. I probably was not as prepared as I felt I was. I didn’t do terrible, but I definitely had some work to do. The 2nd time around I ended up finding a practice exam on Tutorials Dojo by Jon Bonso called AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Practice Exams 2021. I’d used Jon Bonso’s practice exams when studying for the solutions architect associate exam and loved them. Jon’s practice exams have a very good variety of questions across all topics listed in the AWS exam guide. He also includes extremely detailed descriptions of why the answer to a question is correct and why the other options are incorrect. I went through the untimed practice exams several times. After each practice exam I got a report showing the 6 different sections of the exam guide and how I did on each of them. I kept track of these over time to get an idea of which sections I was doing well and which ones I wasn’t. This series of practice exams includes quizzes by section which I used to measure my knowledge for each section I wasn’t scoring well in. I also used it to practice the sections which comprise a larger amount of the exam. The image below is directly from the AWS exam guide and I really hammered on the first, second, and fourth sections as they comprise 67% of the exam.

• You will get many questions regarding Direct Connect.  If you can understand different solutions involving Direct Connect, you’ll be in much better shape.
• You’ll get some questions regarding AWS DNS and hybrid DNS, make sure you understand this.
• Understand the different between the different types of load balancers and when you would use each one.
• Understand when to use VPC peering, transit gateway, AWS VPN, and Direct Connect

Artificial Intelligence + Information Technology Operations = AIOps.

What is AIOps?  How is it used?  What is involved and how do you benefit from AIOps?   All of this is explained in this Panel Discussion highlight video. Experts in IT operations and Managed Services from PTP were joined by experts from OpsRamp to discuss this impactful technology and outline how you can extract value for your organization.

Prior to the days of advanced IT monitoring and management, organizations were forced to deal with thousands of unnecessary alerts.  The costs for operations swelled due to hiring needs to deal with the volume.  However, this additional cost did not necessarily lead to improved service levels.  With more intelligent platforms using AIOps, the majority of this work can be automated resulting in lower cost and better service.

Topology Based Event Correlation

Correlate the context of hybrid infrastructure resources and IT service dependencies so that you can shift from resource-level monitoring to service-level management. OpsRamp’s service maps and topology explorer help you isolate and fix issues for critical IT services through clear visualizations of application and infrastructure dependencies.

Clustering Based Event Correlation

Identify and correlate alerts that share similar alert properties or event attributes such as subject, alert metric, alert source, host name, IP address and device type. OpsQ helps you cut down on large volumes of false alerts and quickly take action with the right alert prioritization.

Co-Occurrence Based Event Correlation

Co-occurrence helps you group alerts based on the historical patterns of specific alert sequences. OpsQ applies machine learning algorithms to learn existing alert sequences, discover hidden connections and reduce alert fatigue with pattern recognition and detection.

How To Get Started?

PTP’s Managed Services team monitors thousands of cloud, network and security systems for dozens of customers.  Our team has expertise in IT Operations inclusive of monitoring, alert management, incident management and AIOps.  Reach out to us for a free consultation and we will show you the power of the platform we use and how it helps us reduce operations cost and improve the quality of our customers’ IT.

Take control of your AWS environment with expert guidance.

PTP helps life sciences teams optimize performance, security, and cost in the cloud.

“What is the value of Cisco Meraki Advanced Security Feature Set vs. Enterprise Licensing?”

This is a question that comes up frequently in discussions with customers. When deciding whether or not to pay for the advanced feature set, you need to understand what the differences are between the licensing modes and more importantly, why would you need/want to use the more advanced features.

The Enterprise License for Meraki provides valuable features involving management, API support, Stateful Firewalling, full-mesh Auto-VPN, High Availability (HA) failover and more. Most of the additional features are centered around security. Security has many layers/aspects so it is important to consider a) the risks that the organization faces, and b) what the Advanced Security Features are and how they might play into the enterprise.

Traditionalists would mostly commonly consider Perimeter Security and Endpoint Security as the two important starting points for protecting data in an environment. However, as time has gone on, companies both large and small are subjected to an increasing quantity and complexity of threats from adversaries. These include DNS Hijacking, Phishing emails with Malware embedded in them or bogus website links, Command-and-Control attacks, Website Redirection as well as Ransomware.

Cisco/Meraki’s advanced feature set helps to deal with many of these issues before they get into the environment, meaning at the edge of the network. It doesn’t mean that one should ignore endpoint protection but that is the subject of another blog.

Let’s take a look at four key features of the Advanced Security Features and what they do:

1. Geo-based firewall rules – If you’ve been in the industry or looked at firewall logs or even ACL hits on devices in the cloud, you will see that there are a lot of people out there scanning and probing for access to devices and that many of them are not from the country you are operating in. This feature allows an enterprise to restrict, specifically block source countries that you would never have a legitimate based business need for.

• Countries for example like China, Russia, Democratic Republic of the Congo etc.
• This saves your firewall which might allow inbound services to devices from even allowing those initial traffic flows to be instantiated.

2. URL Content Filtering – A fairly common practice for most companies, this is built into the Meraki Firewall (MX) where you can select categories of URLs such as

• Abused Drugs
• Malware Sites
• Pornography
• Proxy Avoidance and Anonymizers

3. Intrusion Prevention – This ties in with Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and Threat Grid. These features are designed to catch anomalous behavior that would be traversing the firewall and take action to inform the client and stop the traffic. AMP allows for real-time malware blocking, retrospective malware detection and with the integration into Threat Grid, also allows malicious or suspicious files to be examined by Threat Grid in a sandbox environment and if the file or files are determined to be malicious, all consumers of AMP are updated with this information automatically.

4. Google SafeSearch – This allows you to block adult content from coming up on a Google or Bing search.

Our experience is that smaller to mid-sized companies (up to several thousand employees) who are using Cisco Meraki SD-WAN technology leverage the Advanced Security Features about 75% of the time because the security value is significant versus a cost increase that is incremental. Enterprises, however, who are much larger but perhaps utilize Cisco Meraki for remote locations or small offices perhaps, may already have these security features deployed across the enterprise and may instead choose to pay less for the Enterprise Licensing.

Please contact us for trails or demo units at sales@ptp.cloud.

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PTP offers tailored connectivity solutions that reduce latency, cut costs, and improve compliance with secure multi-cloud strategies.