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

In this video, we’re taking you behind the scenes with PhotoShelter co-founder and VP of Network Operations Jeffrey Arnold. We hope you enjoy getting to know our team!

In 2005, Jeffrey Arnold co-founded PhotoShelter with his friends, Allen Murabayashi, Thom Chin and Grover Sanschagrin. Since the beginning, he’s been responsible for the strength, speed and performance of the PhotoShelter system. Nearly 2 decades years 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,” he says.

He makes sure your assets are safe with us so you can go to bed every night and not have to worry – we’ll do the worrying for you!

(*In 2020, Libris by PhotoShelter rebranded to PhotoShelter for Brands)

10 Things You Might Not Know about Our Network, Reliability and Security

1. Since 2005, PhotoShelter has had 100% durability. We’ve never lost a single bit of data.
2. PhotoShelter has over 700 million assets, and that number is constantly climbing: our users add more than 10 million new professional grade image and video files, support 25 million searches, and handle more than 60 million downloads! Every week, we’re adding capacity and data center space. That means we manage billions of objects amounting to more than 15 petabytes of data.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 that 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.
6. 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.
7. 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, health care organizations and federal agencies, with extreme security and reporting requirements trust us to hold their data. For example, Associated Press, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and ConocoPhillips host their visual media libraries on PhotoShelter.
8. Many of these large brands test our network regularly, so there are a lot of eyes making sure the system is reliable and available.
9. Our development team has architected PhotoShelter to follow the same security thought processes we use in our infrastructure. PhotoShelter users have fine grained access controls to make sure that only the right people have access to the right images at the right time.
10. 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” about how your data enters PhotoShelter, lives in PhotoShelter and leaves PhotoShelter.