The following information describes critical changes that you may be required to make to ensure continued access to the Acoustic products.  Note that the firewall configuration described here is typically managed by a company’s IT organization.

Most companies use a firewall to protect their internal networks. If your company whitelists Acoustic IP addresses to permit firewall access to Acoustic Campaign, you are encouraged to change this approach to whitelist the hostname (URL). In the event of a change to the IP ranges, a potential outage may occur until your organization adopts the new IP ranges, though this may be avoided by whitelisting the *.goacoustic.com hostname.

Acoustic does not expect to frequently make subsequent IP address changes. In the event that we do need to make any additional IP address changes, our intent is to provide customers with 5 to 10 business days' notice when possible. However, it is possible that unforeseen failures or problems (scalability needs, disaster recovery, etc.) may force Acoustic to make emergency IP address changes without notice. As a result, our recommendation is to use a domain name in your organization's firewall whitelist, so that you can be assured of continued access to the Acoustic platform without needing to make any subsequent changes.

Details are listed below. 

Action must be taken by the following dates for the Campaign pods listed below or you will lose access to Acoustic Campaign. 

• Pod A - May 15, 2020
• Pod 7 - May 22, 2020
• Pod 8 - May 31, 2020
• Pod 6 - June 6, 2020
• Pods 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 - Date to be determined

Why is Acoustic making this change?

The primary reason is that modern cloud practices utilize much more dynamic environments than was done in the past. As Acoustic continues to modernize and improve its infrastructure, we will start to adopt capabilities such as elastic scalability and even dynamic data center allocation.  These changes will allow Acoustic to provide greater reliability and scalability.

Implementing these dynamic infrastructure capabilities will not require you to make any changes to your application or access patterns. However, there are scenarios in which the IP address used to serve an application or request will change, possibly even from request to request. As a result, if you only have a fixed IP address listed in your firewall’s whitelist, then you may be denied access to the request or service. Listing the hostname (URL) in the whitelist will avoid this problem.

Listing a hostname in the firewall whitelist is considered a best practice that also improves security over time. When a whitelist only includes lists of IP addresses, it is harder to manage that list and ensure that older entries are correctly deleted when necessary. The use of hostnames makes the ongoing management the list easier, which improves security. 

What changes do you need to make?

If your firewall whitelist currently includes specific Acoustic IP addresses, your IT team must whitelist *.goacoustic.com. If more specific whitelisting details are needed, please refer to the table below to determine which “New URL” hostnames need to be added to your whitelisting settings to ensure continuous access. Any IP addresses listed will no longer work, based on the schedule listed above.

In addition to this whitelist change, you may also need to change the hostnames used to access the Acoustic applications.  This change will need to be made to your applications, in addition to the whitelist.  The hostname changes can be made immediately, although they are not required to be made until June 30^th.  See Standardized Acoustic URLs for details of the URL changes.

Who do I contact for assistance?

In the event that your team needs additional assistance or if your team has questions, please contact Acoustic Support at https://support.goacoustic.com.

New hostnames