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…)