FireHost Names New CEO

PRESS RELEASE

Dallas, TX – March 17, 2014 -- In a significant move resulting from mounting years of fast growth and widening market demand for its secure cloud offerings, FireHost, the secure cloud company, announced today the appointment of technology veteran Jim Lewandowski as its new chief executive officer (CEO). This move occurs in concert with founder and former CEO Chris Drake's decision to take the reins as the company's chief technology officer (CTO). Together, the CEO and CTO appointments accelerate FireHost's effort to grow, innovate, and deliver secure clouds that fill a void in a cloud provider market clamoring for greater, more effective security.

Lewandowski is a seasoned cloud and security veteran, bringing with him more than 25 years of executive leadership with companies like Rackspace, McAfee, Yahoo!, BMC Software, and IBM. He was most recently a senior vice president and general manager at Rackspace before establishing a technology consulting business.

Drake, who founded FireHost in 2009 and launched its secure cloud in 2011, has served as CEO since its inception. During his tenure, he led the technology development in addition to establishing its business presence around the world – a presence that has grown immensely in various industries, such as healthcare, retail, financial services, and the public sector. Along the way, the company has doubled revenue in each of the past three years.

Key Highlights

Lewandowski built a reputation leading great teams that delivered exceptional revenue and profit growth for a number of companies in the cloud, security, software, and enterprise markets. In addition to his work at Rackspace, he served as executive vice president of the Americas at McAfee, vice president of business and enterprise sales at Yahoo!, vice president of sales at BMC Software, and business unit executive for storage systems products at IBM.

Lewandowski already serves on FireHost's board of directors.

As the new CTO, Drake will concentrate more time on FireHost's innovation. The leadership changes announced today will fuel the company's growth as his team accelerates its technology innovation and delivers it to customers.

Under Drake's leadership, FireHost successfully expanded its secure cloud from the Americas to the European and Asia market, created FluidScale, the industry's only rebootless scaling technology, designed the highest-performing cloud infrastructure available, and blocked more than 100 million hack attempts against its customer base in 2013 via the company's unique Intelligent Security Model&trade.

FireHost has already established a much-needed position in the marketplace as the leader in secure clouds. The company's quick emergence results from its unflinching belief that cloud customers should not settle for poor security that exposes them to hacking disasters.

Quotes

Chris Drake, FireHost's new CTO

"I made the decision to become CTO because technology innovation has always been my passion. The need for security in the cloud is the most critical priority in the industry. This leadership change allows FireHost to double down on innovation to help customers capitalize on it faster. Jim's industry expertise, business sense and socket fit with our culture make it possible for me to reinforce the company's innovation engines while he continues our rapid growth to even higher levels. This leadership change comes at the right stage of FireHost's history, and we believe that the company is positioned extremely well."

Jim Lewandowski, FireHost's new CEO

"Settling for poor security or 'checkbox compliance' is unnecessary and unacceptable. We want to help businesses understand that they should no longer tolerate poor security from their hosting and cloud partners. We need the industry to think beyond insufficient, 'checkbox compliance' as an end-all solution. Compliance with security standards like PCI and others does not mean a company's data and applications are properly protected and secure. We only need to look at the latest, much publicized security breaches to see companies that thought PCI compliance meant they were protected, only to discover they were needlessly exposed to disastrous brand-damaging security breaches. FireHost provides industry-leading secure cloud computing that promises to protect customers' applications and data from malicious attacks. We are hyper focused on security innovation and uniquely positioned, with the right people, the right technology, and a dedication to protecting our customers from malicious security threats. For us, there is simply no compromise when it comes to providing enterprise-class security for cloud computing workloads."

Chris Drake's Blog Post: A Note to Our Customers & Friends

About FireHost

FireHost offers the most secure, managed cloud IaaS available, protecting sensitive data and brand reputations of some of the largest companies in the world. With private, cloud infrastructure built for security, compliance, performance and managed service, responsible businesses choose FireHost to reduce risk and improve the collection, storage and transmission of their most confidential data. FireHost's secure, managed cloud IaaS is available in Dallas, Phoenix, London, Amsterdam and Singapore, and offers robust, geographically redundant business continuity options across all sites. Based in Dallas, FireHost is the chosen secure private cloud service provider for brands that won't compromise on the security of their payment card, healthcare, and other regulated data. www.firehost.com

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