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According to Innovative Retail Technologies, 52% of surveyed retailers plan to actively move applications to the cloud this year. The initially tepid response to cloud is waning as retailers learn more about its strengths for availability and innovation. Yet, one question our AWS consultants frequently field from retailers is about achieving PCI Compliance in the cloud. As most readers of this blog know, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, otherwise known as PCI DSS, is an information security standard requiring organizations to incorporate controls around customer data to prevent credit card fraud. There are several ways that AWS helps its retail clients build a foundation for PCI compliance and they’ve recently announced one more in the form of a Quick Start.

While we write frequently about backend technologies, as AWS consultants, we also work with businesses on client systems and as the hype around AWS WorkSpaces grows, we have been fielding an increasing number of inquiries about it. A managed desktop computing service in the cloud, AWS WorkSpaces enable users to access their files, applications, and other resources through a supported device, regardless of their physical location.

Automating common administrative tasks to improve workload reliability and decrease potential risk is a common theme our consultants at Flux7 help our clients with. Doing so simplifies administration, encourages security through consistency and helps improve control over users and permissions. Amazon launched EC2 Run Command in October 2015 to help attain these benefits.

Service Discovery is not new. The idea of a tool that can discover how processes and services talk to each other and help facilitate connections has been around for some time. However, with the rise of increasingly dynamic environments, the important role service discovery plays continues to grow. Indeed, since the beginning of the year at Flux7 we have seen a surge of customers looking for container-based microservices architectures that highlights the need for service discovery due to its dynamic nature.

Creating a healthy security posture is one of the key factors in achieving PCI DSS certification, especially for enterprises. Truly, when it comes to security, even the smallest of details are important and can cause huge troubles. As a result, in this post we'll talk about how to achieve better security outcomes with help of version control and automation and how this can help you  with your PCI DSS certification.

Amazon announced its Elastic Container Service (ECS) at re:Invent 2014 using Pristine as a case study. Given Flux7’s Amazon expertise, it’s likely no surprise to frequent readers of this blog that Pristine is a Flux7 customer who we have been working with for some time now.

As AWS experts we work closely with organizations who handle a wide variety of sensitive information – from patient health records to credit card data and more. Resultantly, we are always on the look-out for technology and best practice-based improvements to ensuring cloud-based security. With more and more of our clients looking to embrace a microservices architecture, cloud security and compliance naturally didn’t stop being a focus which is why we are happy at the news from AWS today that they’ve addressed how to help secure container-enabled applications with IAM Roles for ECS tasks.

It’s rare to find the business that isn’t grappling with growing business pressures, whether it’s business competitors becoming more effective through the use of emerging technologies, growing global competition, and even the increased effectiveness of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Those organizations that learn how to not only embrace emerging technologies, but master them, are going to be the victors in the immediate years ahead.

As AWS consultants, we have helped a wide variety of clients make the transition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) through a migration. Inevitably, one of the more complex and time consuming phases of cloud architecture planning is helping the enterprise get its arms around the assets it intends to migrate and making a plan based upon that data. Luckily, Amazon recently announced a new service called Application Discovery that helps expedite the process and make it much easier to dig in and begin planning.

We are really looking forward to DockerCon next week and hope to see you there. It will be our second time co-presenting a customer solution on stage and think you’ll be fascinated to hear what Jay Blanchard of Fugro and our very own Aater Suleman have to share. They’ll present the story of how Fugro and Flux7 brought a new Internet of Things (IoT) based service to market with high uptime and portability, based on Docker containers and Amazon Web Services (AWS).