Cloud Innovation Meets Enterprise Security

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by My Global Presence. The award winning Atlanta public relations agency that elevates brands and non-profits through authentic storytelling and national media campaigns. Find them at myglobalpresence.com. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, My Global Presence. If you want global visibility and meaningful impact, go to myglobalpresence.com. Today on the show, we have the CEO with Atlantic.Net, Marty Puranik. Welcome.

Marty Puranik: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Atlantic.net.

Marty Puranik: Sure. We provide cloud hosting and developer hosting for AI services such as AI models, HIPAA compliant hosting for healthcare, PCI for e-commerce. So you can find us on the web www.atlantic.net.

Lee Kantor: Now, who is the typical customer for Atlantic.Net?

Marty Puranik: Our typical customer is will be B2B type customer or a developer or both a developer within a B2B service environment. Typically, people are making applications that then serve end users.

Lee Kantor: So what’s kind of the pain that they’re having right before they hire you? Are they do they already have a provider and they’re switching to you?

Marty Puranik: Yeah, sometimes they do. Sometimes it’s a new project. What happens is that the industry has gotten more and more complicated. So you have got storage, different types of storage layers. You’ve got servers for compute now with AI. You have GPUs which are made by Nvidia, and then you have AI models that run on top of those. So it’s kind of tying all the pieces together. That makes it a little bit tricky. And that’s where we help our customers.

Lee Kantor: Now you’re launching a fortress portfolio. Can you talk about what that is and why someone should know about it?

Marty Puranik: Yeah, sure. So we have our new fortress plans, which are a new type of hosting that includes a lot of the things our customers have been asking about or have been curious about. So one of the interesting things that’s happened in the industry is that as it’s continued to evolve, the demands our customers have from their customers or from their own internal teams has also evolved as well. So as an example, when you first, you know, ten, 20 years ago when you did a website, you initially needed monitoring. Today it’s moved into something called observability. And observability means that not only do I need you to monitor it, I need you to tell me if something’s going wrong, what it is. So it’s. How quickly can you repair whatever’s wrong to get the website back or service back online. Similarly, with security, the very. At the very early stages, all you needed was a firewall. Then that kind of moved over to intrusion detection. Now there’s intrusion protection services, which I don’t want you to just detect that there’s a problem happening. I want you to protect against that. So I want you to keep updating. Give me an updated database of, you know, daily new vulnerabilities and protect against those. So the industry has really evolved in terms of what customers are asking from, from vendors like ours. Um, and so we’re keeping up that pace and doing that with the fortress plan. So it’s something that’s very 2026.

Lee Kantor: So previously those kind of services were add ons, and now they’re just kind of table stakes if you’re offering cloud and hosting solutions.

Marty Puranik: Yeah, I would say that they were either add ons or they didn’t really exist. Um, like for example, there might be a potpourri of solutions. You might stitch together to create those. So you could have some kind of holes in that in your, in your architecture. So this is we’re using things have kind of standardized and moved in a way, in terms of standardized in terms of what customers want. And so we’re able to offer that, uh, in a, in a easily consumable format. So people don’t have to go out and stitch these things together themselves.

Lee Kantor: And so that’s just built into the service when they’re hiring you, that just comes along for the ride.

Marty Puranik: Yeah, that’s included now and then.

Lee Kantor: Do you customize it to the specific needs of the customer? Or is this kind of a one size fits all solution?

Marty Puranik: Well, you know, obviously most people, you know, need the basics. They need hosting and servers and perhaps they need databases or, you know, we can customize that. But I think where we go a step beyond is that we also can make it compliant for their environment. So if it’s like I said, HIPAA for healthcare, PCI for e-commerce, um, one of the other things we do is that we’re third party audited. So, uh, we have our something called the SoC two. We’re also audited for HIPAA. That’s important that we have us based auditors that do that. And they do on site field work. The reason that’s important is because there’s less expensive ways to get that done. And you might be able to use an overseas solution. But for our customers, they need to make sure that that compliance work is done kind of as a, as a, as a baseline. Because if they do have problems later, if they need to make sure that their insurance is going to cover them, um, that has to all be, you know, all the T’s need to be dotted and all the I’s. I’m sorry, the eyes need to be cross. The t’s need to be cross, the I’s need to be dotted. So, um, I think really one of the ways we really differentiate is that the quality of service we provide and that people, our clients can trust us to, you know, not skimp and do things the right way.

Lee Kantor: So there’s a lot of your work in health care.

Marty Puranik: We do quite a bit in health care. Uh, that’s obviously a big growing part of, of America, right? Uh, so there’s no doubt, uh, that’s, that’s an area that’s, uh, you know, growing. And especially now we’ve got medical devices, um, a new types of health care. So remote devices that people might have at home, uh, that also need to be, you know, that are reporting data or need to be monitored. So I think that’s a pretty big growth area in the coming years. Um, you know, just with all the new technology and AI that’s coming about now.

Lee Kantor: When it comes to cyber threats, how do you, um, help your customers? It sounds like you’re doing a lot of work proactively. Um, how do you help your customers? Uh, you know, uh, operate in a safe or as safe as possible environment.

Marty Puranik: Well, as an example. You know, several years ago, maybe not that many years ago, um, it was okay to have just a firewall, which is something very, very basic, uh, to protect your website or protect your data. Now we’re kind of migrating towards something where, you know, you’re actually inspecting the traffic that’s going through and looking for things that are suspect. So that might be important. You wanted to make sure you want to make sure you don’t have somebody doing data exfiltration where they’re taking your data and, you know, taking it out onto the internet and putting it somewhere else. Um, we’re updating security signatures on a regular basis, uh, so that it’s not just protecting you from threats in the past, but ones that are being discovered today. So it’s, it’s more of a real time framework versus something that was more of a static product several years ago.

Lee Kantor: So now with the, um, really fast adoption of AI, how does that impact your work with your clients, how do you kind of help them stay ahead?

Marty Puranik: Well, it’s exciting because it’s all changing and everybody’s experimenting. I mean, who’s not experimenting with different AI solutions? I think it’s going to be a challenge, you know, going forward in terms of there’ll be new types of threats that can be created by AI. Um, so it’s going to be helping our customers stay ahead in terms of making sure we protect them from, from things like that. I think it was in the news with, uh, right now, uh, with anthropic where, you know, the government has essentially blocked their newest model because it’s potentially a threat to U.S. security. So, you know, we’re at the very, you know, at the very edge of trying to figure out, uh, the best ways to handle that, you know, as a society, um, how we’re going to deal with AI going forward.

Lee Kantor: Now, from your client’s perspective, is AI is that just mean they need more cloud space. Like what is the how does that impact the clients? Is it just to protect them from these new cyber threats? Uh, where does the AI kind of come into play in your business where you can be helpful to your clients?

Marty Puranik: Well, what happens is that clients will typically make an application, and then they can integrate AI into it to help that application be more effective. So if it’s searching for anomalies in a database or if it’s trying to look at, uh, marketing data in a new way, um, or if it’s going to automate things that are very tedious, like, um, going through, uh, a website and looking for if there’s any typos or grammatical errors. Um, you know, AI can make sense in all those, all those in all those ways. So typically what happens is that a customer will write code to talk to an AI model. And there’s many AI models and they’ll interact with the model. And then they have they have something called compute, which is on there. After they’ve talked to the model, they will, you know, do some computation to think about what to do with that data. And then they will either store it in a database or store it into, um, a storage product and bring those, those things together and then present those to their ultimate client, whether that’s, you know, it might be a mobile phone app, it could be a website that their customers using. So the AI is used really for trying to be thoughtful or do things that might be difficult to do manually or too expensive.

Lee Kantor: So now when a client decides, okay, I’m gonna start working with Atlantic.Net. What is it like to onboard? How difficult is it to migrate to one of your sites?

Marty Puranik: Well, we have two ways that clients onboard. One is through our website. They can sign up and make an account, and it’s a self-service model. We have a portal so that people can either provision services through that, or they can talk to an API, which is what most programmers use software developers use, which is an application program interface, and then they would talk to it programmatically. Alternatively, we have managed products where they typically work with a rep to understand what their business needs are and what they’re trying to achieve, and they’ll put together a solution that meets the criteria that they need and kind of put the framework of everything they’re going to need together. And then we can build that out for them as well. So it really depends on how our customers want to consume it. Some people want more of a self-serve model. Some customers want more of a managed layer that’s helping them, you know, operate it.

Lee Kantor: And then so you can, you can kind of choose your own adventure. You can go whatever serves you right.

Marty Puranik: Yeah. And it can change. So for example, you might start in a managed environment, uh, where, where we’re helping run things for you. And then as the product scales, they might say, well, you know, we have a group of developers and we want to bring it in-house. Um, and then we’re going to, you know, start using the API or you can use a combination of services. Um, it really comes down to what the business is trying to achieve and how they want to do it. Uh, we, you know, we’re kind of a lubricant in terms of helping people get to the finish line and get what they need done. So we’re happy to help however they want to achieve that.

Lee Kantor: Now, you’ve been doing this for a long time. Um, how important is that having, um, you know, decades of experience in this space? How does that help your clients?

Marty Puranik: I think that’s actually one of the most exciting parts because there’s obviously a lot of people that join the space or they’re, they’re new to the space. But having been there, I mean, we started as a dial up internet company. So having that intrinsic knowledge of the whole sector, and I’ll give you an example. We had a software developer that had visited and we took him to the data center. They’ve been in the industry ten years and they said, you know, I’ve never seen a data center before. I’ve never been inside a data center. I don’t know how they work. I’ve just used to talking, talking to servers programmatically. So it was an eye opening experience for him. But it’s a good example of having people who’ve been there, done that, who’ve been doing it for so long that they intrinsically, really, really know how it’s all put together and how it all works, which is helpful when things go wrong, but it’s also helpful for designing things so that they’re going to go right. Um, and I think it’s probably like anything else in life, if you, if you’re going to need a surgery, serious surgery, done, do you want a guy that’s been doing it for 30 years, who’s done it 30 for 30 years, or do you want somebody who’s, you know, just started? Um, so there’s, I think there’s a lot of nuance to this industry that gets lost That, um, I think customers appreciate having people who understand how it all works and how we got here.

Lee Kantor: And then part of that journey is you’ve been able to, um, you have eight data centers around the world.

Marty Puranik: Correct?

Lee Kantor: Now, why is that a good thing for a customer?

Marty Puranik: Well, it’s good for a number of reasons. One of the most popular reasons is lower latency. It’ll be more snappy and and faster to piano depending on where the customers are. So we have a site in in London, we have a site in Singapore. So for Asian customers, they’ll appreciate that the data is in Singapore or the websites, you know, able to be seen from Singapore and load very quickly. Um, there can also be compliance issues. So there may be, if you’re doing government work, maybe the data needs to reside in the United States or it needs to reside. We have a customer that’s a healthcare entity, um, that works, uh, with, with the UK healthcare government, um, entity. Uk healthcare entity that handles that in the UK. And that data needs to say, uh, in the United Kingdom. So it could be data residency, it could be making it so that it’s faster, it could be done good for redundancy. Uh, so there are a lot of use cases.

Lee Kantor: And you have, uh, customers obviously all over the globe because, I mean, that is part of why you have so many data centers around the world because you have customers around the world.

Marty Puranik: Correct. We have customers in, I don’t know, maybe 190 countries, but over 100 countries.

Lee Kantor: So now, um, when, when companies are working with you, a lot of companies are relying on, um, intermediaries. Do you have any type of, uh, community that you’ve built for those intermediaries to help their customers?

Marty Puranik: Uh, we have a partner program where we’ve worked with some partners and we do have some select partners that that help with specific, uh, things that we don’t do. So as an example, just keeping it very simple. Um, if customers need to locate their data, there’s data centers we might work with since we don’t operate data centers anymore ourselves. Um, so that they can, you know, uh, co-locate or put equipment that maybe doesn’t reside well in the cloud or for compliance reasons. So we do have somewhat of a network, uh, depending on what our customers need help with. Um, but we don’t have a formal group that get together or anything like that.

Lee Kantor: But when a customer comes to you for help, not only do they have your expertise, but you have a network from having done this for so long of trusted advisors that can help them probably solve any problem they might have.

Marty Puranik: Yeah, just from having it, having done it so long, if they need help with a development case, if they need help with compliance auditing. Um, yeah, we can usually put point people in the right direction if it’s something we don’t do, uh, point them to somebody that can help and, you know, get things done. And that’s just from having done it so long. We know who’s good and who’s who’s not and who’s going to be efficient. And, um, you know, get, get to a great outcome.

Lee Kantor: So is there, um, any trend that you’re keeping your eye on? Obviously AI is on everybody’s mind, but is there an area within that that you are excited about?

Marty Puranik: Yeah, I think that the most exciting part I think I brought before is the security and observability layer, which we’re putting in the fortress plan, which is giving people more and more data and proactive data on in terms of what’s going on in their environment. So it’s exciting to see that, you know, the table stakes of what the expectations are from a, from a hosting a project have moved from really the basics, which, like I mentioned before, was maybe just monitoring to really understand how everything is running. And, um, it’s kind of fun to see. So as an example, uh, if we use AI models as an example. Pardon me, uh, there might be, um, you know, you might be running an AI model and not be getting 100% usage of the, of the GPU, which the AI model runs on. So you might think, oh, I need to buy more of these. And it may turn out that you might have a bottleneck somewhere that you weren’t aware of that if you unblock, you don’t really need to spend more money. You just need to run what you have more efficiently.

Marty Puranik: So if you don’t have visibility or observability, to know that the typical answer is just to spend more money. And those those can be quite expensive every month. So it’s exciting to be able to show people ways to do what they want to do in a more efficient way, and having customers get buy in and, and, and learn more about how everything works. Um, so it’s not just, um, a black box. People can actually, you know, they’re seeing more and more. It’s kind of, I guess the analogy I would use is it’s kind of like being able to see the cooks in the kitchen, right? Before it was all hidden. And you just bring out the, the end result at the end. And this is more like a kitchen. You can see how it’s everything is made. And so you can see, uh, not just when things go wrong, but how amazing it is that things are going right and that you’re running efficiently and that you’re getting the maximum usage of, of what you already have.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Marty Puranik: Um, well, uh, that’s a good question. I think it’s, um, you know, there’s a lot of movement in the space in terms of especially right now, like we say with AI and AI models. And it’s literally changing every week. Uh, so it’s, it sometimes gets frustrating because, um, you know, trying to keep up and and I wouldn’t say frustrating is the right word, but it’s it’s a lot to keep up with. Right? And, and you have to take all this and turn it into something that’s digestible for customers. And that’s always difficult when it’s changing so fast. So the right answer today may be the the wrong answer in 2 or 3 months. Um, or it could be as early as next week, but keeping up is, is, uh, is, uh, you know, luckily we’re very passionate about this in the industry, but it’s, it’s tough, right? It’s tough to keep up on all the changes that go on.

Lee Kantor: So where do you go for information? Where’s your kind of go to source to stay on top of things?

Marty Puranik: Um, you know, most of it’s online because it’s all changing so fast. There’s obviously message boards, there’s, there’s online chats. Um. There’s, uh, you know, talking to other people in the industry about what’s going on and what they’re seeing. That’s where you get a lot of information, what works and what doesn’t. Because a lot of times you might read something online that, hey, that sounds pretty neat, but you talk to somebody that’s actually used it like it doesn’t work at all, or it’s not stable or, you know, you’re going to run into problems. So it’s really nice to be able to kind of dodge those landmines by having been in the industry and getting to what’s actually going to work for customers in production today. Um, but that’s, it’s, it’s a lot to keep track of. And it’s good to have, like I said, have been in the industry, know people who’ve been in the industry as well. Um, and I think it’s probably like any other industry, if, you know, just having been there and having all the connections that we do, um, it gives us a lot more visibility of kind of where things are going and, and what, what not to do, right? Which is also important.

Lee Kantor: So any advice for the IT leader out there? Um, you know, when they’re dealing with such change so quickly and so chaotically, is there some do’s and don’ts that you recommend for the IT leader that wants to stay abreast of all the stuff that’s going on?

Marty Puranik: I mean, I would say that, you know, you don’t have to be the first person, you know, doing it all. Um, I would because it changes so rapidly the, you know, an idea that might seem like a great idea today may not, you know, be so great tomorrow. So I’d say, you know, you’re not falling behind. Everybody’s kind of a little bit stressed and confused because it’s changing so rapidly. So, um, you don’t have to be the first person in the door. You can be thoughtful about it. Kind of keep a North Star while you’re doing all this. So let’s say you’re going to get involved in what are you trying to achieve with it. If it’s, um, let’s say you’re trying to reduce resolution times with issues, um, that’s your, if that’s your north star, then make sure you stay focused on that because there’s a tendency, tendency for there to be feature creep because it’s okay. Not only do we want to reduce, uh, response times, but we want to start doing 2 or 3 other things. And, you know, when the scope starts becoming really broad and you lose track of why you’re, why you started a project. It can become it can kind of devolve into something that’s very difficult. So just keep track of what what the focus is and what you’re trying to do. And, you know, take your time and, you know, do it in steps. Um, and, uh, you know, you really have to experiment because one model, and just to give you an example, the cost of different AI models can vary as much as like 50 times, right? So $50 versus $1.

Marty Puranik: So some people might say, well, I’m sending everything to the $50 model because that’s the simplest way to do it. It’s like, but you’re paying 50 times the amount of money. So you might have a model that’s slightly inferior, that might cost 90% less. And you can, you can split. You don’t have to send everything to the most expensive model, right? You can say, hey, you know, this other model, you know, is 90% less. And it can pretty much do what the more expensive model can do. So let’s say it’s, it’s transcribing, uh, voice to text and the cheaper model might be make a few more errors, but that’s okay because a human is reading it anyway and it can fix the human can fix it. And if it’s going to be 90 or 98% less, um, you know, obviously it makes a lot more sense than sending everything, uh, to the most expensive models. So that’s something that’s kind of the industry is going through right now where you’re splitting the workloads between, uh, you know, more cost effective models. Uh, but once again, all these models are improving dramatically almost week after week after week. So it’s, it’s, uh, it’s a challenge to know which, which, you know, what, what the best setup is. And that’s going to change, you know, over time.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, it’s a moving target because the best today might be third place next week, and it might be first again a month from now. Like it changes, like you said almost daily.

Marty Puranik: Yeah. And it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to make videos, there might be, you know, a particular model that’s better if you’re, if you’re trying to run a chat bot, you know, do chat, that’s something different. If you’re, if you’re, uh, making audio files or having it transcode video, that’s, that might be a different. So it’s, it’s, it’s once again, like I said, that North star being, what are you trying to achieve? Because if the North star is, I need to transcribe, uh, transcode video and it’s like, well, what’s really important there? Is it the quality of the how fast is it the speed at which it transcodes. Um, because if you can transcode it at a, let’s say at a slightly inferior rate, because it’s going to go online or on YouTube where it might be acceptable. Um, you know, that might be one model and something that’s going to be going on a 4K TV might be something different. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s, it’s the wild, wild west. It’s very, very fast moving.

Lee Kantor: So now is there a story you could share, uh, that maybe illustrates why it’s a good idea to work with Atlantic.Net, is there? You know, maybe share that a company came to you and with the challenge and you were able to help it and maybe get to a new level because because of your, um, cloud and hosting solutions.

Marty Puranik: Yeah, that happens actually pretty frequently. So, uh, you know, we might have a customer come in and say, hey, you know, we have an idea or we have a project that we want to get off the ground. Um, we’re typically able to cut the development time and the cost significantly. So something that might be, you know, 9 to 12 months, we might be able to get it done in six weeks, eight weeks, um, at a dramatically lower cost just because we’ve done it, we’ve been there, done that. So we know kind of the best way to set it up. Whereas the client might be experimenting with different configurations to kind of get to the same point we’re already at. Um, so, um, you know, frequently we talk to customers and we can kind of lead them to where they need to start or where they need to go and dramatically, uh, cut the time to market. Um, and it’s, it’s, it’s pretty valuable.

Lee Kantor: So Marty, if there’s somebody who wants to connect with you, uh, get in touch with somebody on the team, what’s the best way to do that?

Marty Puranik: Uh, you can contact us, you know, obviously go to the website. We have www.atlantic.net. We have chat, their email, phone, so whatever people prefer.

Lee Kantor: And then like you said, you can do it yourself or you can have help. Um, and all that will be shared there on the website.

Marty Puranik: Yes, absolutely.

Lee Kantor: Well, Marty, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Marty Puranik: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.