Behind the Scenes with PhotoShelter for Brands: Powering a Secure, Reliable Network

Go behind the scenes with PhotoShelter co-founder and Vice President of Network Operations, Jeffrey Arnold.

In 2005, Jeffrey Arnold co-founded PhotoShelter with his friends, Allen Murabayashi, Thom Chin, and Grover Sanschagrin. Since the beginning, Jeffrey has been responsible for the strength, speed, and performance of the PhotoShelter system.

Nearly two decades later, he ensures that the files and websites of 80,000 photographers and brands are secure and available.

“The core of what I do is obsess over keeping our customers happy,”
Jeffrey Arnold, PhotoShelter Co-Founder and Vice President of Network Operations

He makes sure your assets are safe with us so you can go to bed every night worry-free—leave the worrying to us!

10 Little-Known Facts About PhotoShelter’s Network Reliability and Security

Since 2005, the PhotoShelter platform has been 100% durable. We’ve never lost a single bit of data.
PhotoShelter has over 1 billion assets, and that number is constantly climbing! Our users add more than 50 million new professional-grade image and video files, have conducted over 180 million searches, and have downloaded more than 60 million assets! Every week, we’re adding capacity and data center space. That means we manage billions of objects amounting to more than 20 petabytes of data. We manage billions of files amounting to more than 15 petabytes of data.
All PhotoShelter websites offer free SSL security, which means visitors can navigate your website through a secure connection via HTTPS (they will see a “Secure” message, rather than the “Insecure” warnings that browsers like Chrome and Firefox have started showing). This can also improve your site’s SEO if you have public images on your Portal.
Every aspect of PhotoShelter’s infrastructure has redundancy, from the network level to the server level to the individual drives that store your photos and videos. We have multiple data centers around the USA and the EU and multiple network providers at each data center.
To make sure you can wake up every morning knowing your files are safe and your websites are up and running, we have resiliency, firewalls, and additional checks and balances to make sure no one thing that could fail could slow up your day. In 15+ years of managing our own proprietary cloud-based platform, our system has proven its reliability with a track record of greater than 99.99% uptime.
We are constantly running internal tests to make sure the network is reliable and secure. But just in case, we also have security scanning from at least three different vendors.
Our focus on the security and availability of our data is the reason why some of the world’s most prestigious brands and organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, and federal agencies with extreme security and reporting requirements trust us to hold their data. For example, The Associated Press, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and ConocoPhillips host their visual media libraries on PhotoShelter.
Big brands test our network regularly, so there are a lot of eyes making sure the system is reliable and available.
Our development team has architected PhotoShelter to follow the same security thought processes we use in our infrastructure. PhotoShelter users have customizable access controls at every level of file organization to ensure that the right people have access to the right files any time they need them.
We focus on every layer of the data security lifecycle. When a server is retired, we destroy all the data, and the drives are crushed. As Jeffrey says, we are “completely paranoid”—in a good way, about how your data enters PhotoShelter, lives in PhotoShelter, and leaves PhotoShelter.