The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) requires that if you accept, transmit or store credit cardholder data you must meet the requirements contained within the standard.  The problem is that many people don’t know what that means.  If you deal with credit cards and are required to meet the PCI DSS, my advice is to find a way to limit the scope of your compliance as much as possible.  Rackspace recently concluded a two-year effort to receive our PCI Service Provider Report on Compliance (ROC) as a Compliant Level 1 Service Provider from Visa USA.

Rackspace pursued this compliance so that we can provide a PCI Compliant Hosting Infrastructure for its customers.  Infrastructure, in this case, includes:

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John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, recently delivered a presentation at LinuxWorld entitled “7 Stages of Scaling Web Applications: Strategies for Architects. I’ve emdedded the slides from his presentation below. Please share your thoughts!

Greetings from San Francisco! I’m here because there are two conferences currently occurring that we think you’ll find interesting.

The first conference is one you may have heard of – the 10th annual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Each year, around 10,000 software developers, system administrators and IT professionals attend LinuxWorld, making it the largest conference focusing exclusively on Linux and other open-source technologies.

The second conference actually spun out of LinuxWorld two years ago – the Next Generation Data Center conference. The two conferences share a lot in common – both shows are produced by the same company, they take place in the same location, and they actually share an exhibit hall. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that it is just one big conference – that is, until event security tackled you for trying to get in to one conference when you only paid for the other.

Luckily for you, I’m going to give you the run down on both conferences – thus eliminating “dodging event security” from the list of things you need to worry about today. You can thank me later.

If you were at either conference, chances are that you ran in to someone from Rackspace at some point. Rackspace CTO John Engates presented at both conferences, and Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce is presenting at LinuxWorld on Thursday. We also have an awesome booth where we are running a server break-fix competition, as well as a booth in the career fair pavilion where we are looking for the next generation of Rackers. Everywhere that you turn, Rackspace is there. We’re subtle like that. (read more…)

I have been in this field for over 30 years and this is the most exciting time to be dealing with security and risk management. The good news is that there are more tools, resources and support for the industry out there now than at any time in the past. The potential downside of that is there are a lot more people using a lot of different methods to try have a less-than-desirable effect on all of us.

Businesses need to look at a number of different methods to deal with things like web attacks, social engineering, identity theft, scams, compliance and plain, old-fashioned theft. Security, Risk Management and Compliance are no longer items to be looked at after big decisions are made. Rather, these three key components should be part of every key decision. Every decision has an inherent level of risk. I do not advocate inserting controls for the sake of controls or compliance just as I do not advocate ignoring risk and hoping that nothing happens. Every good decision should be made by looking at the potential downside of little or no controls and compare that with the potential downside of the cost of controls. The right balance is the right answer (see diagram). (read more…)

Rackspace just completed its second ‘Green’ week. A year ago, Rackspace launched Greenspace, a proactive campaign to address the issues of power consumption and efficiency, carbon emissions, and general environmental responsibility.

Since then, we’ve come out with products like the Green Server configuration (utilizing the most energy efficient hardware, with all of the carbon usage offset through NativeEnergy). We’ve begun offering cloud hosting through Mosso and virtualization. And most notably, our new data center in Slough is run completely on renewable energy.

So what was Green Week?

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DNS or Domain Name System is a service most commonly used to translate Domain Names (URL’s, websites, call them what you will) into IP Addresses. Realistically, IP Addresses are the true identifiers of how to locate things/places on the Internet, however DNS makes it much simpler to “surf” by only having to reference Domain Names that are much easier to remember. DNS functions in a hierarchical structure

Rackspace uses an implementation strategy called AnyCast with our Authoritative DNS. This technology allows us to announce the same DNS IP space from 3 different (or as many as desired) datacenters via the BGP protocol we run with our Internet Service Providers. The purpose of this is multi-fold in that it not only allows us to have active/active DR type redundancy, but it also allows us to serve customer requests from the closest DNS infrastructure possible, which typically means the best response time too. Additionally, it allows for the ease of maintenance, upgrades, and expansion our our DNS infrastructure with no customer impact.

This is the same kind of underlying technology that the Root Nameservers of the Internet run off of, and many other companies that specialize in DNS as a service.

Order by phone or online?  Pickup or delivery?  Generally speaking, there isn’t one way of doing things.  We all have preferences and priorities. This is something lots of us have thought about over the years at Rackspace.  How do each of our customers want to be supported?  Does it depend on the situation they’re in? 

From my experience, each customer defines Fanatical Support a little different.  For some it’s about being able to call at 3am and have a team of Linux experts eager to troubleshoot an unusual Apache error.  For others it’s about having the power to go into the MyRackspace customer portal to create a snapshot of their virtual server. This is one of the beautiful things about Fanatical Support; it represents many things to many customers.  And so, having options is very important.

We’ve heard consistently from customers that while they love having a team of Rackers available to support them around the clock, many prefer to just take care of some things themselves. Self-service matters at Rackspace! Self-service is about offering choices that make hosting easier and more efficient.  If a customer has the expertise and would prefer to just knock out a quick change themselves, then they should have the tools available to easily make this change.  This is something we understand and have a fleet of folks working to deliver. (read more…)

I wrote on the RackLabs blog over the weekend about our first Rackspace Developers Conference and I thought I’d post a pointer to it here on the Rackspace blog too. To make a long story short, we held a big conference here in San Antonio last week for all of the Rackers who develop software here at Rackspace. We’re thinking next time we’d like to invite some of our customers. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in attending?

Also, if you’re a developer and interested in joining Rackspace, we’d love to hear from you too. We’re looking for talented developers, especially those skilled in the Python and Java languages.

I’ve been at Rackspace for a while. People ask me from time to time to explain exactly what Fanatical Support is. Typically, I try my best to walk through the basics of our approach, philosophy, etc. The challenge has always been that it’s hard to do so without getting into the technical jargon. For most folks, this causes eyes to glaze over and typically buries the important information under a series of acronyms and such in the listener’s minds. So, recently, I’ve tried to find other examples - even outside of the Rack - to help paint the proper picture.

Rackspace doesn’t have the market cornered on great service in San Antonio. There are businesses, and more commonly, individual people that exhibit the same traits we look for in Rackers. Not only was a recent experience my family had an example of this, but it serves as an excellent, non-technical, illustration of what Fanatical Support really looks like. (read more…)

Last week, Rackspace attended Gartner’s Midsize Enterprise Summit in Orlando, Florida to talk to CIOs about hosting. We were given the opportunity to speak at four “boardroom” sessions during the three-day event. Our goal was to tell attendees about Rackspace and how hosting is a great alternative to do-it-all-yourself IT. I presented our story to about 100 IT decision makers from companies all over North and South America and apparently made an impression.

Honestly, I didn’t even know there were awards to be won at the show, but on the last evening of the conference we attended dinner and an awards ceremony where Gartner presented awards that were voted on by the attendees. We won! We were awarded the Midsize Enterprise Summit’s Mid Market Innovation Award in the service category. (read more…)