The nature of cybersecurity threats is that there is no standard nature to them. They constantly evolve because they are the work of determined criminals who don’t give up.

So any cybersecurity bundle has to be dynamic and not static. It has to not only defend effectively against known threats, it also has to be on the lookout for emerging threats and have the ability to adapt.

At UBX Cloud, we protect our clients’ data and systems with our security bundle. It not only springs into action when an attack looms, it also keeps an eye out for vulnerabilities it can address ahead of time – and lets us know when we need to take immediate direct action in regard to a given situation.

Here are some of the elements of our security bundle, and how we utilize it to protect our clients:

• Advanced Threat Protection guards both endpoints and servers so they’re ready before a threat even shows up, and can shut down any attempt to access your system. • When a threat is present, the security bundle automatically deploys a combination of predefined and custom response actions across your entire system infrastructure to stop the threat cold. We are familiar with a wide variety of attack methods, so we’ve programmed in the most effective responses for those – while still leaving the system capable of conceiving a custom response when necessary. • The bundle constantly scans for vulnerabilities and sends alerts so we know what requires patching or any other sort of action well in advance of a threat. • Managing access permission is critical, so when an account’s access permission changes, the system detects it and alerts us so we can react quickly if the change has a suspicious origin. • Whenever critical data is accessed or changed, the system will know, so we move rapidly in the event of a potential problem. • If any malware or other type of attack hits your system, the XDR function detects it quickly and initiates a strong response. • We keep an eye on the Dark Web as well, so we know if your organization is producing compromised users or PII data.

Of course, all of this comes under the guise of our own team’s close watch on your system and your data. The security bundle is excellent, but we don’t expect it to do our job for us. It helps us to do the job of protecting you better.

The members of our team tightly monitor your system and your data on a continual basis to make sure it is safe and secure.

Cyberattackers don’t stop looking for new ways to hit you. But with our knowledge, experience and tools, we know how to stay several steps ahead of them – so that when they do show up looking for trouble, they find that they’ve got trouble.

And you don’t.

For those who are affected by the Microsoft and Amazon outages today – and who isn’t in some way? – you might expect both corporate giants would be trying to move heaven and earth to get the outages solved.

If you know anything about how these companies operate, you’ll know better than to have such luck.

The truth is, both of these companies are complete garbage when it comes to outages, and that’s because there is no economic incentive for them to care.

Microsoft and Amazon save money through multitenancy and oversubscribing. Multitenancy is when a single application serves multiple customers, or “tenants,” so each tenant’s data is supposedly kept private, but all the tenants have to share the available bandwidth.

Everyone accesses the same resources. It’s cost-efficient in theory, but it puts everyone at risk of an outage in the event of a single point of failure.

To top it off, they make it worse by oversubscribing, which is to say they allocate resources to more clients than they could actually accommodate if everyone tried to use the resources all at once.

It works out great for Microsoft and Amazon because they sell way more capacity than they could actually provide – and way more than they actually have to pay to maintain.

Have you ever bought tickets for a flight and were later told they were “oversold”? You sit there and wonder why they would sell more seats than they have, and they end up having to ask people to give up their seats. It sounds insane because it is, but it’s the same theory. They don’t think everyone will actually show up and they can just keep the money for the unused tickets.

If this theory holds and they never really get more users than they can handle, they’re fine. But when you have an outage, lots more people are affected.

You could probably get a 10 percent credit from Amazon or Microsoft if you work yourself to the bone, but it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort. No one expects you can get ahold of anyone at either company about the outage, so people just shrug it off and figure it’s a fact of life.

As a private company, if we did this poor a job providing service to our clients – and took this cavalier an attitude toward outages – our clients would leave us.

And we would deserve it.

We know that, of course, and we actually care about our clients, so we do everything to make sure their service is reliable. But Microsoft and Amazon don’t. Because they don’t have to. And because it’s not in their nature to.

Solution? Let UBX handle your cloud storage and data management needs. We actually care. Email me today at steven.panovski@ubxcloud.com. I’ll respond and everything.

If you’re in telecom or any industry that demands carrier-grade cloud, it’s easy to assume that the only real options are AWS and Azure. After all, the Big Cloud giants have built their reputations on capacity and scale.

But here’s the truth: What you gain in “scale,” you lose in control, transparency, and value.

Too often, businesses assume they must accept whatever terms Big Cloud puts in front of them – limited bandwidth, shared platforms, premium-priced “top-tier” hardware, storage performance capped around 60,000 IOPS, and extra fees for every essential service like managed support, firewalls, backups, OS licensing, and network speed.

The more you think about it, the more you wonder why you associate Big Cloud with high capacity. They may have it, but they don’t provide much of it to you unless you pay a veritable extortion. And when you add up those costs, it’s not capacity you’re getting, it’s extortion disguised as infrastructure.

The UBX Cloud Difference

UBX Cloud delivers true carrier-grade private cloud – all within a single 48U cabinet – and we do it without the fine print or hidden fees.

Here’s what comes standard:

• Top-quality hardware • Unlimited bandwidth • Four ways to access support • Dedicated Juniper vSRX firewall • Veeam enterprise backup • 100 percent uptime guarantee • OS licensing • 24/7 monitoring and managed security support • 100GE private network • 500,000 IOPS of storage performance • Tier 4 data facility • Private, non-shared resources for data storage

All of it in one comprehensive package and a fair price.

How Do We Do It?

By now you’re wondering how we provide all that when Big Cloud can’t (or won’t) even come close to offering it to you. There are several reasons.

First, we have excellent strategic partners who give us access to expansive storage capacity, including storage partners Pure Storage and Zadara Storage.

Second, we don’t oversell our capacity on the theory that all our subscribers won’t use it at the same time. We assume you need everything you’re paying for and we make sure there’s room for you to take full advantage.

Third, we recognize that providing top-quality data management makes the rest of our jobs easier, and it makes your operation more secure and more likely to continue operating without glitches.

Transparent Pricing. No Surprises. Real People.

At UBX Cloud, everything’s included upfront. No tiered pricing traps. No “add-ons.”’ No nickel-and-diming.

And because we operate efficiently, our clients typically pay about 50 percent less than what Big Cloud would charge for equivalent (or often inferior) performance.

When you need support, you won’t get lost in a ticket queue – you’ll get a real person who knows your name, understands your setup, and actually cares about solving your issue.

Big Cloud’s Biggest Myth

Big Cloud has done a good job of one thing, though: They’ve convinced a lot of businesses that only the biggest players can deliver carrier-grade cloud. But it’s just not true.

Not only can independent providers like UBX Cloud provide carrier-grade cloud, we can do it more economically, more reliably, and with better performance all-around.

We care about the value you receive because we care about the relationship we have with every customer.

Experience the Difference

If you’re ready for carrier-grade performance without the Big Cloud baggage, give us a call.

We’ll show you just how much better it feels to have the power, transparency, and support you’ve always deserved.

Senior system engineer Mohamed Ali has earned a nickname that might sound a little intimidating at first – but for UBX Cloud clients, it’s actually a badge of confidence.

“People call me a butcher,” he says.

But he’s not butchering choice cuts of meat or anything along those lines. What Mohamed butchers is problems. They are helpless when he shows up.

“I love problems, which is to say I love to solve problems,” Mohamed explains. “So anything that challenges me, I want to spend my time figuring out and understanding what is happening. Fixing the problem makes me happy. They usually call me the butcher, which comes from fixing impossible things.”

With a deep passion for troubleshooting and a drive to “fix the impossible,” Mohamed thrives on challenges that push him to understand and solve even the most technical issues. His work ensures UBX Cloud clients stay operational, online, and protected from costly downtime. In industries like healthcare, that reliability can mean far more than saving time or money. It can mean saving lives.

Since joining UBX Cloud in 2015, Mohamed has become a key part of the infrastructure team, managing server architecture and serving as a backup administrator. He’s known for staying calm under pressure and delivering quick, effective resolutions when it matters most.

According to Steven Panovski, CEO of UBX Cloud, Mohamed is the strongest link in the UBX chain.

“When we first worked together,10 years ago, I was blown away,” Steven says. “Here is this young man in his early 20s and he is the best damn engineer I’ve ever seen. He is omniscient and has awareness into everything technical and otherwise. When others cannot, Mohamed can!”

His time with UBX has seen him move from contractor to employee to manager to part owner in less than 10 years. In addition to great results for clients, Mohamed has also delivered the welcome benefit of sound sleep for his boss.

“We are the guardians of cloud, and we work in the dark, without anyone seeing what we actually do and how profound our involvement really is,” Steven says. “When my shift would end and I handed the baton to him, I would rest peacefully knowing that nothing would go wrong. Our team has called him ‘The Butcher of India’ and ‘The Chuck Norris of Cloud’ – and rightfully so!”

Before joining UBX Cloud, Mohamed built a global career as an infrastructure engineer for India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, along with additional experience as a support engineer for a managed service provider in Canada, and as a system engineer for a company based in Chennai, India.

He is based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, and has a Bachelor of Computer Science from Madurai Kamaraj University.

The health care industry is where you go to heal if you get physically injured or attacked. But what happens when the health care industry is injured or attacked – not physically but digitally?

The answer is that hundreds of millions of people’s medical records can be exposed. In fact, there’s no “can be” about it. It’s already happening.

Minnesota-based Change Healthcare was hacked in 2024, with an astonishing 192 million patients having their health records compromised by a hacking incident.

You read that right: One hundred ninety-two million patient records.

That was the largest breach of patient records in history, by far, although it was certainly not the only significant one in recent years. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan saw 13.4 million patient records exposed in 2024, while Colorado-based Welltok Inc. experienced a breach in 2023 that put 14.7 million patient records in the hands of hackers.

There have been more than 100 breaches in the past several years affecting 1 million or more patients each. And these were attacks against well-established companies who had full-time IT departments and strict HIPAA-compliance policies and procedures.

Cyber attackers know where they can inflict the most pain, and recent reports say they are focusing more than ever on the health care sector. The organization Health-ISAC recently reported that in the third quarter of 2025 the industry saw an uptick in threats associated with broader events and growing risks.

One of those includes the notorious Shai-Halud worm, which is distributed through malicious NPM packages and embeds itself in other packages owned by the target. From there it exfiltrates data to public GitHub repositories.

Another common attack on the health care industry has involved phishing attacks using QR codes that hide malicious links within images – thus bypassing much of the security that would otherwise stop them.

When patient records are compromised, it’s a nightmare both for the patients and for the providers.

UBX Cloud clients are protected by a cybersecurity platform that is based on UTM Stack, which combines network layer, infrastructure, end-user, and AI-based protection. It combines alerting and mitigation into a single interface that makes everything completely visible.

There is much any organization can do to protect itself – from regular patching to network segmentation to employee education on phishing attacks. But you also need a system that can sniff out threats, and can recognize the most serious kinds and take action immediately.

The health care industry has invested heavily in information technology and in solid professionals to manage it. But not every IT professional is a cybersecurity expert. Many are top-notch at designing networks that can operate efficiently and store data effectively, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are up to speed on the cyberthreats that evolve and emerge on a daily basis.

It’s critical for top executives within health care organizations to understand the difference, and to make sure they have the people, the tools, the strategies and the discipline to stay ahead of cyberthreats. Hundreds of millions of patients’ data should provide more than enough incentive.

But the threats are only becoming more lethal and deceptive. As the health care industry relies increasingly on its digital systems to operate, attackers have the ability to shut down entire enterprises. Both the financial and human cost of that are too horrible to contemplate.

Get on top of this now. We’re here to help.

Companies who opt for cloud data storage may sometimes be under the impression that cybersecurity is now less of a concern for them – since no matter what happens they can always retrieve their data from the cloud.

There is some truth embedded in that idea, but it misses many critical facts about the nature of cybersecurity threats today. Denying you access to your data is one of the ways cyberattackers can hurt you. But once hackers can get their hands on your contracts, HR agreements, financial information and so many other things, they can sell it off, or extort you to pay them not to.

Imagine the harm a hacker could do to a law firm that has 200 clients – all of whose files got exposed to the hacker. Consider what you would do if you were the firm’s managing partner, and you received a threat from the hacker to contact all those clients and make demands.

Or, the hacker will tell you, you could make an extortion payment to stop it all from happening. You’re probably going to make that payment. But how did you end up in that situation in the first place?

Cloud-based data needs protection every bit as sophisticated as the data on the server in your office – and far too many companies find out too late that their cloud storage provider doesn’t really offer sophisticated data management services with strong cybersecurity measures built in.

UBX Cloud protects clients’ cloud-based data with CrowdStrike and Veeam, a cybersecurity tool that combines network layer, infrastructure, end-user and AI-based functions into a single interface.

This is critical because far too many users don’t realize how vulnerable cloud-based data can be. Even people with IT backgrounds can make mistakes when implementing cloud configurations (as they can with internal servers as well).

Mistakes like an employee clicking on a phishing e-mail, or giving away log-in credentials to someone who is up to no good can be particularly dangerous with cloud applications, as many cyberhackers only require log-in credentials to access the entire system.

If hackers can gain access to a company’s cloud-based data by absconding with someone’s log-in credentials, the consequences for the company can be devastating.

Several issues can expose your cloud-based data to risks, including:

Exposed APIs. This well-known acronym for Application Programming Interfaces refers to the systems that allow different digital platforms to communicate and exchange data with one another. But APIs can be exposed to hackers, and when they’re hit, they can give hackers access to all the programs and users who are working through them.

Let’s say I sell t-shirts, and your company has published the prices of materials I would need to make the shirts. Using APIs, my site can query your site to get that information. Every time that happens, you get charged for the API query. You know that, and you figure the likely volume of activity is one you can handle.

But hackers can manipulate queries like that, to the point where they are able to take over your entire system. Suddenly you jump from 1,000 API requests in a month to 400,000, and finance wants to know why the bill is so much higher. By the time IT realizes what’s going on, you’re deep into these charges. That’s the wrong way to find out your system is figuratively on fire.

**Overprivileged users. **Granting too many people high-level access creates unnecessary risk. Most employees only need limited permissions, and administrative rights should be tightly controlled. Convenience should never outweigh security – because it only takes one misuse to compromise critical data.

Cloud systems are particularly vulnerable to what’s called zero-day attacks, in which hackers take advantage of patching issues before the user realizes the patch is necessary. Open-source software is especially at risk for such attacks, as many of the companies who use such software don’t have the IT bandwidth to patch as often as they should.

In theory, cloud storage shields you from system attacks. In reality, it only works if you have the right protections in place. That’s why businesses choose UBX Cloud – we’ve already built the tools, expertise and strategies to keep your data safe.

Security isn’t automatic. You need UBX Cloud to be confident your data is safe.

UBX Cloud has solved one of the most vexing problems the auto industry currently faces. That’s the good news. The challenge – for both UBX and the industry – is that while most recognize the problem, they don’t realize there are much better solutions than the ones they are currently pouring money into.

I’m referring to the challenge of managing the flood of data that’s being produced for use by autonomous vehicles. This data will mostly be used to establish driving and safety parameters. It’s the information that comes from cameras and sensors while the cars are moving.

The more data a company has, the more competitive it will be in bringing autonomous vehicles to the market. Companies will be able to effectively train their models, bolster their simulations and lessen the cost of manufacturing.

But the cost of having all that data is that it needs to be stored and managed, and auto companies are being put in a terrible position by Big Data companies like Amazon and Microsoft – who charge outrageous amounts for storage and do little to help manage the data. Yet automakers stick with these arrangements because they get hooked on the apparent reliability of the data giants. Without being aware of other options, most feel stuck – and they end up cutting budgets in other areas just so they can pay their Amazon bill.

That’s entirely the wrong priority. We should not be cutting corners in other critical areas to pay a data bill.

At UBX Cloud, we’ve solved this problem.

The Blind Spot No One Saw Coming

If your company wasn’t prepared for this data surge – and most weren’t – you’re now scrambling to manage it with tools and processes that were never built for this scale, which became all the more problematic when we recognized the volume of data was growing so quickly – and becoming increasingly complex at a stunning rate.

Most unprepared companies turned to their software vendors for answers – often getting pushed toward costly cloud solutions that they would have to deploy. These companies find out quickly that the public cloud is essentially utility-based computing, which means you pay per what you use. As the volume of their data explodes, the cost reality becomes eye-popping.

All the more so because leaning on Amazon or Microsoft cloud services means discovering quickly that those providers sell capacity, not data management.

The results? Sky-high bills, and teams left to do the heavy lifting themselves. But the costs are measured in more than dollars as well. They’re also measured in lost trust and lost time-to-market.

So what next? Data needs managing. It’s complex. It can’t be divided easily. Think about the full chain for a moment: Getting data off the vehicle, into an ingest center and into your cloud environment. If any part of that pipeline falters, you’re left with delays, gaps in compliance and frustrated teams still trying to piece it together. Companies are quickly finding this out when they get billed for millions of dollars and they’re still having to manage all of the data themselves.

So let me tell you how we solved this problem.

At UBX Cloud, we approached this differently. We built a solution tailored to the automotive industry, based on our expertise for managing backups.

How UBX Cloud Solved This Crisis

We have established a business relationship with two exceptional partners – Pure Storage and Zadara Storage. They give us all the capacity and speed the industry needs.

We have also partnered with a company in the auto supplier community that handles the logistics of actually getting the data trays to the storage facilities. And thanks to the full array of our partnerships, we now have access to storage facilities to serve both ends of the U.S. – one in Detroit and one in Denver.

Our logistics partner gets the data trays to the ingest centers, and we handle the data management. Our clients don’t have to do that – unless they choose to. (We have multiple plans tailored for you.)

The cost of this for client companies is so much lower than what they’re paying now, some are using the savings to bolster other critical areas of their operations.

No longer do you need to rely on providers who aren’t data people, who can’t get the data to the proper locations quickly, and who don’t know what to do (or who to call) when they have problems managing it – which is inevitable.

The partnerships we have work exceptionally well for us, our partners and our clients because each company has the expertise and capacity to make it work.

We know how to manage the data – even when it’s this complex.

Our storage partners have the capacity and the protocols to keep everything secure and flowing.

Our logistics partner is quick, precise and trusted in the industry.

It works. And it’s saving automotive companies from getting buried in data management tasks and/or getting socked with multimillion-dollar cloud storage costs.

The Road Ahead

The data being generated for autonomous vehicles will only multiply. Automotive companies cannot afford inefficiency or runaway costs. UBX Cloud has already solved this problem. We have the partners, the capacity and the expertise.

It’s time for the automotive industry to stop being overwhelmed and start gaining control.

It’s time for the rest of the industry to benefit.

Steven Panovski is president and CEO of UBX Cloud, a Royal Oak, Michigan-based firm providing cloud and data management services to the business community.