Security compliance is validated by an external Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) for large volume transactions and by Self Assessment Questionnaire ( SAQ ) for small volume transactions. This security organizations ensure that a minimum level of security should be maintained by the merchants when they store, process and transmit cardholder data. There are 12 PCI compliant requirements as formulated y the Payment Card Industry Security Standard Council (PCI SSC). These are then segmented into four levels of PCI Compliance depending upon the volume of credit card transactions per annum. PCI Compliance Level 1 is best suited when Visa and/or MasterCard transactions are over 6 million per annum. PCI Compliance Level 2 when Visa and/or MasterCard transactions are between 1 million to 6 million per annum. PCI Compliance Level 3 when Visa and/or MasterCard transactions are between 20,000 to 1 million per annum. PCI Compliance Level 4 when Visa and/or MasterCard transactions are below 20,000 per annum and for other cards transactions below 1 million per annum. Level 1 companies are entitled to yearly review by internal auditor and network scan by approved scanning vendor by PCI DSS. Level 2,3 and 4 companies have to complete SAQ (Self Assessment Questionnaire) annually and network scan by approved scanning vendor.

Credit card transaction is more prevalent in B2C businesses like the hospitality, retail industries. The PCI Compliance process for hotels, American Hotel & Lodging Association have declared that hospitality industry contributes around 55% of the total Credit Card fraud complaints. 80% of the data breach cases have been identified at Level 4 merchants. Many hotels and resorts follow a legacy system due to the outdated software and Information technology infrastructure they installed and followed over years. Now these systems cannot encrypt cardholder’s data and make it secure and ,so, are not capable of complying to PCI Standards. Time has come where all the hotels, resorts and spas should be made compulsory to update the existing Information system inorder to comply with PCI Standards. Hotels, resorts and spas should make an audit with the help of their software vendors to find out their process to secure data is in compliance with PA DSS (Payment Application Data Security standard) or not. This certification will certify the merchant’s commitment to their client’s data security. Most fundamental criteria in understanding whether the system is complying or not can be checked if the system is automatically logging out on inactivity for 10 minutes. Card holder data should be covered up, so, that only 4 to 6 digits must be appearing wherever mentioned by the system. Data or card  verification codes should be encrypted within the database. Data security process for PCI compliance must follow a complete process from top to bottom of the hierarchy in the company to make it successful. Better compliance means better service to card holders and reliability factor increases which will lead to more business.

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Payment Card control objectives and data security requirements are listed for better clarity. Some of them are to develop and maintain a secure network, privacy of card holder’s data, data breach vulnerability program, strong access control measures, periodical monitoring and testing, maintain information security policy. All the processes are formulated and followed based on these basic requirements.

As per the framework, the vendors has to install and maintain a firewall to prevent from piracy attack. The card holders are barred from using any password forwarded by the vendor. Any kind of card holder data should be protected under any circumstances. There should be regular use of anti virus to protect the system from any malware attack. A unique ID to be provided to the user dealing with financial data for easy tracking of any misdeed. A routine monitoring check of the data security and its physical access has to be tracked and safeguarded. Regular testing has to be done to understand its sustaining capabilities against hacking.

Industries which are more prone to bulk and instant financial transaction through payment cards like credit cards and debit cards need frequent attention of the data security standardization. Resorts and casinos, retail, ecommerce etc are more prone to frequent financial transactions. These industries are also very much vulnerable to financial fraudulent activities and ,so, utmost care has been taken by the PCI.  Casinos in particular have many activities like dinning, spas & fitness, events, golf apart from gambling which indulges patrons for extensive financial transactions. Personal information resulting due to these transactions are been stored by the casinos for understanding consumer behavior and pushing services in packages that will ensure more spend by patrons. There are government bodies like New York Gaming commission, Nevada Gaming Control Board, etc, apart from PCI DSS who ensures in securing the best interest of the patrons. This regulatory body intervenes and ensures that the Casinos does regular checks into any kind of patron’s data breach possibilities. These bodies provides license to the vendors for carrying out any operation for casinos. To prevent any data theft, the patrons have to provide government issued identification number to prove their age and eligibility. Secondly, the patron must forward their contact information like email address and residential address and lastly, enter a secure PIN number which will be confidential  for any secure transaction with the casinos.  An article 603A of the constitution is in place to safeguard patron’s interest. The government bodies ensure proper maintenance of security measures, encrypting the data as mentioned in the Personal Information while in transmission and data storage device and disclosing security breaches which would have impacted Personal identification.

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General IT service providers are the superset to the Cloud providers. IT managed services includes software development to implementation, followed by support and monitoring. These services are majorly done for clients having on premise servers.  Cloud managed services needed a bit different expertise than on premise IT managed services. Cloud managed services are dependent on the products and service features (EC2, S3, SQS, Cloudfront, Mapreduce etc.)  provided by different Cloud Providers like Amazon Web Services, Azure, Rackspace, Joyent, IBM SoftLayer etc. IT managed services are dependent on the operating system (like windows, linux, Mac etc) , development skills (PHP, .Net, JAVA etc.).

Complete IT based technology services contribute around $4 Trillion market and out of which Cloud providers contribute $16 Billion to the market. The most important aspect to the fact and figures is that the Cloud Computing business is in the nascent stage of the business cycle. Amazon Web Services is the market leader and contributes 30% of the total revenue. Azure has the fastest growth of about 96% year on year, followed by Google at 87%.

The global IT services market grows at an average rate of 2.5% to 3% annually. Whereas, Global Cloud services market grows at an average rate of 50% annually. General IT services companies are slowly diversifying their service offering to Cloud computing services to stay in the competition and reap the maximum benefit from the growing market. Cloud computing is expanding its wing into other form of latest technologies like Big Data analytics, predictive analytics, Internet Of Things. Where IT services market is gradually approaching the aging market ,but, Cloud computing is slowly taking its acceleration with the growing economy.

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Financial sectors with its increased revenue and resources are gradually finding it challenging to maintain the same approach towards data security and IT system management. With the increased demand for mobility and fast computing  for better service and IT system management, financial enterprises are slowly vying towards Cloud Computing option with a cautious approach. Financial Institutions cautious approach are limited to  lost control, availability and access to data, data security, data location, auditing and exits. This is added by highly regulated services to customer data makes it a long drawn and time taking process in migrating to the Cloud.

This data sensitive sector is more keen to adopt Cloud Computing services for the following reasons in descending order priority like flexible Infrastructure capacity, reduced time for provisioning, reduction in TCO, reduced time to market / value, limited in-house technical and human resources, service value, flexible payment models (pay as you go), mobility, infrastructure deployment automation (API services), better security, better collaboration.

Top features of Cloud management, which are expected by the financial sector the service providers are also listed in descending order priority like increased transparency and better auditing controls, better data encryption tools, receiving the logs in real time, audit the service remotely, forensic and e discovery tools, incident reporting mechanism, clarity on responsibility and liability attribution, audit the data center physically, clearer policy and better tools for service portability, privacy enhanced technology, better solution for data classification.

Top Cloud applications adopted by financial sectors listed in descending order priority like application development, CRM, email, content management and collaboration platforms, storage, disaster recovery, data archiving, data analysis and intelligence, human resources, marketing tools, big data services, spam management, customer support, ERP, fast processing, mobile security, backend services.

Cloud computing regulations that have to be adopted for providing Cloud managed services to the financial sectors are data protection, corporate governance, PCI-DSS, National regulations, GLBS, Basel 3 (for banks), PA-DSS. National regulations are followed by auditing (FedRAMP, ITAR), auditing standards (FFIEC, NIST), banking standards ( GLBA, OSFI), Cybersecurity framework (Insurance Standards, PIPEDA), FDIC (IRS, SEC)

Cloud service management is at its nascent stage and moving slowly towards setting up a trend for almost every industry existing. Therefore, it will be injustice to declare that financial institutions shun away from migrating to the Cloud. After studying the requirements of the sector to ensure data privacy and confidentiality, it is legitimate to demand the features, support and reliability assurance from the Cloud service providers. Cloud companies also gradually add up to regulatory standards and compliance. The day will not be far when all financial institutions will be in the horde for Cloud Computing.

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Cloud computing is the advanced form of on premise hosting and are designed to manage the feature deficient in eCommerce sites.  There are typical problem for eCommerce businesses  like website break down during peak hours or surge in traffic,  sudden need for space due to increase in product portfolio and built in apps, ERP (like inventory management or Customer Relationship Management). Cloud Computing has auto scaling, load balancing features which automatically adjusts with the sudden need for increased computing and increased storage thereby allowing smooth functioning of the online resources.

Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud computing company and offer computing services for eCommerce enterprises. We have discussed one of the cases to understand the benefits of using Cloud Infrastructure and services.

Ice.com , an eCommerce enterprise into retailing jewelry migrated to Amazon Web Services Cloud. It is based out of New York, United States. ICE was growing fast with its increasing need for IT  hardware and ,so, hosted on two servers located in Montreal, Canada. They were bearing a monthly expense of $26,000 for managing the physical servers. Besides, they were running a risk for no disaster recovery plan for the resources and also had plans to introduce many new web store application, an enterprise resource planning (ERP), a content management system ( CMS) and a  business intelligence ( BI) platform for the smooth functioning of the business. ICE hired an AWS partner for system development, remote administration, automation, deployment and scalability of web applications on AWS Infrastructure.

AWS  sets up ICE eCommerce sites, ERP, CMS, BI keeping in compliance with the PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard and Cloud security best practices. ICE used all Amazon features like Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing), Amazon ELB (Elastic Load Balancing)  and Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Implemented Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud ) to host the ERP and BI platforms. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storing html and static pages. AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) allowing secured authorized access to staffs and availing instances at multiple zones like East and West US coast  with a proper disaster recovery plan.

 ICE reaped the benefit in fastest new application migration due to the presence of Cloud Infrastructure, otherwise, which have not been possible. Overhead staff expense was reduced to half wherein one database administrator and one IT professional replaced two administrators and three IT professionals. Moreover, AWS helped ICE to save $250000 annually for migrating to Cloud Infrastructure.

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The internet is, these days, awash with very many web services; now that it is so easy to become a web service provider. So the big question, today, is does this present web users with the right resources to get their businesses and online objectives going?

The answer to this question is “yes and no.” “Yes,” because there is a tool for almost every web users’ need out there. And whatever is not there, is quickly noticed and created. The answer was also “no” because some of these services come at a cost and many a times one gets to pay for a service or product that when utilized ends up not performing as intended.

The other reason one would say “no,” according to one aws consultant, is because most of them provide the same alternatives; making it difficult for one to tell which one is genuine and which one is fake. This has been partly solved by the many users and professional reviewers out there. But not every product or service has been reviewed and who says reviews cannot be manipulated!

 One would also say “no” because many people base their decisions on the visual presentation of the various web service platforms; and as they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

That is why before one settles on any web service provider, any aws management consultant will insist that you really need to analyze their ability to satisfy your online needs. And to achieve this, are many proven strategies; some of which are discussed below.

The first thing is to identify your needs or rather what your website or online activities lacks for you to achieve your goals.  For example, why aren’t you getting enough visitors to your website or what do you want to tell or achieve on the web. With this kind of information, you will know what changes you need to do in order to achieve your online goals.

After this has been done, you will need to research using, the search engines, for web services that could provide the solutions to your online problems. Normally, with a search engine like Google, you can quickly get to know the top solutions to your problem. Normally they rank on the first page of the search results but  they are not necessarily the most expensive. The ranking is based on the likelihood that this product or service will meet your search query.  Of course the top, search results are often from the companies paying the most for advertising. But logically, these companies cannot do so if their service or product is not good. That would be money thrown down the drain if consumers buy their products then use the various forums and review sites to soil their name.

That is why once you have the top performers, you need to search for reviews from consumers and experts that have used the products or services from the top ranking websites. Your objective is to not only see whether they will meet your needs but also to find out ‘who else is offering a good service but is not ranked up the ladder yet.

And from this information you can make an informed decision and end up with the right web service provider. The one that meets your needs and costs just right.

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Big Data with Predictive analytics will not only help to predict existing consumer behavior for a product or service, but, also helps in consumer behavior and future sales forecasting. As per the latest  McKinsey analysis, enterprises experience 5 to 6% better productivity due to the use of big data and predictive analytics. It is observed that ROI (Return On Investment) in marketing increases by 15 to 20% due to an improved Sales decision using analytics extensively. Assuming, global annual marketing spend to be $1 trillion (as per different marketing reports), there is a return of additional $150 billion to $200 billion over the investment.

Big Data analytics tools need an ultra advance platform to store, extract and analyze both structured and unstructured data and present them in the decision making format to the marketers. These platforms can perform only in high computing, highly distributed architectures and new level of memory environment. All these requirements for the analytics can be fulfilled by Cloud Computing. Cloud platforms have the agility and capacity to accommodate such huge and fast process effectively.

Big Data has its challenges, competencies and potentiality to be extracted and analyzed for better marketing performance. Analytics in marketing ultimately help in customer engagement, customer acquisition, retention and marketing efficiency. Big Data types essential, must be extracted to collect consumer behavior or attitudinal data  from activities like marketing campaigns, points of sale, websites, customer surveys, social media and online. Collect operational data from activities like marketing operations, resource allocation, asset management and budget controls. Collect financial data from activities like sales, revenue, profit margins, marketing expenses, etc. The Big Challenge for the Big Data is to track the appropriate data for marketing analytics. Followed by the challenge to select the right analytics tool for the right analysis to hit for the right marketing impact.

To introduce Big Data analytics into a marketing function CMO need to have strong reasons to back the investment. CMO need to define his objective in analyzing which part of the data his enterprise generates year on year and what impact he can bring in by doing such exercise?. The Big Data strategy may backfire if any right interpretation of data from wrong source is executed. CMO should be very particular about the source before concluding anything from the analysis.

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• Performance – You share the server (and storage and bandwidth) with other websites. It means that if traffic to other websites hosted on the same server goes up, your site will slow down.
• Lack of control – You don’t have full control over the server. It means you cannot install any software as you need to. You can only use the resources that are already available on the server.

Large scale websites use dedicated servers as they need dedicated bandwidth and full control of the server.
The largest companies such as Google and Microsoft use data centers that are essentially a farm of dedicated servers. They use hundreds and thousands of dedicated servers because of their bandwidth requirements.

Challenges with Traditional Hosting
With traditional hosting, you need to purchase additional servers as the traffic to your website grows.
For example – if you have 10,000 users, you can go with shared hosting. When you have 100,000 users, you will get a dedicated server and then add more dedicated servers as number of users and volume to your website grows.
You will need to keep purchasing servers as the traffic to your website grows. The extra servers are of no use when the traffic slows down. In today’s world where hardware has become a commodity, the value of servers depreciates more than 50% every year. It means that your investment into purchasing new servers has a very small or negative ROI.

Cloud Hosting
Large companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace rent out their server farm (data centers) for customers to use on a per-needed basis. These companies are called as cloud infrastructure providers (IaaS).
Instead of investing money into purchasing new servers, you can rent the server(s) from the cloud infrastructure providers on a per-needed basis. This is called cloud hosting.
Think of this model as leasing a car (cloud hosting) rather than purchasing a car (traditional hosting). However, in the case of cars – where you can easily sell your used car to someone else therefore getting some return on your investment – in the case of servers, you really can’t sell it to anyone. Therefore the return on your investment is close to being zero.

What are the key benefits?

• Huge cost savings: Cloud technology is paid as you go instead of being paid up front, saving organizations significant money. You pay for exactly what you use, not for additional server, storage or processing that you don’t use.
• Flexibility and Scalability: Servers scale up and down automatically depending on the applications’ needs unlike traditional hosting where you have to manually add or remove servers as the traffic to your website changes.
• Highly Automated: No longer do IT personnel need to worry about keeping software up to date.

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Access permissions

The most ideal approach to permit a AWS consultant access to your assets hinges on upon your level of commonality with the AWS environment and with frameworks organization as a rule. In the event that you know your direction around the AWS toolset and you’re open to administering SSH keypairs, then you presumably as of recently know how to permit alternate gathering access securely. This article is not implied for you. (Sorry!) If you don’t know your route around the Ec2 toolset, particularly the charge line API devices, and the AWS Management Console or the Elasticfox Firefox Extension, then you will be better off permitting the AWS consultant to start and arrange the Ec2 assets for you.

Giving EC2 Access to a Third Party

A third party is somebody who is not you (you’re the first party) and not Amazon (they’re the counterparty, or the second party). An outside AWS consultant is a third party.] Let’s say you need a contractor to start some Ec2 examples for you and to set them up with particular programming running on them. You additionally need them to set up computerized EBS previews and different courses of action that will utilize the Ec2 API.

What you should give the AWS consultant

Give the contractor your Access Key ID and your Secret Access Key, which you may as well get from the Security Credentials page. The Access Key ID is not a mystery – however the Secret Access Key is, so determine you exchange it safely. Don’t send it over message! Utilize a private Dropbox or other secure strategy. Don’t give out the message location and watchword that permits you to log into the AWS Management Console. You don’t need anybody yet you to have the capacity to change the charging qualified data or to sign you up for new administrations. Then again to request stock from Amazon.com utilizing your account.

What the AWS consultant will do

Utilizing Elasticfox and your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key the contractor can start Ec2 cases and make all the essential design updates on your record. Additionally they’ll have the capacity to put these qualifications set up for computerized scripts to make Ec2 API approaches your sake – get a kick out of the chance to take an EBS depiction. The contractor can likewise set up some code to take EBS previews – and the code will require your credentials.

What deliverables to expect from the AWS consultant

Make sure to get an clarification of how to change the certifications utilized by any code needing them. Actually, you might as well demand that this must be simple for you to do. Besides, ask your contractor to set up the Security Groups so you will have the sanction you have to gain entrance to your Ec2 sending from your area. What’s more, obviously, before you discharge the contractor you may as well confirm that everything fills in of course.

What to do when the contractor’s engagement is over

Make new access key credentials. Anyway don’t handicap the old credentials just yet. First and foremost, upgrade any code the contractor instated to utilize the new credentials and test it. When you’re certain the new credentials are living up to expectations, handicap the credentials given to the contractor (the “Make Inactive” join). The above guidelines additionally apply to working with interior assemblies inside your conglomeration. You should not have to disavow their credentials, contingent upon their part – however you may as well follow the recommendations above.

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