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Nowadays, we participate in ecommerce activities on regular basis without appreciating what goes on in the background and how these services are monitored for security. In the following article, you will find brief overview of the main steps involved when performing online payments and how these services are regulated by the authorities.

A customer (Cardholder) is purchasing a product form a merchant who accepts credit card on-line payments. The merchant uses a third-party organization (called the acquirer) that provides card processing services. Customers obtain their credit cards from an organization (called issuer) such as, banks or financial institutions. There are various brands (card associations) of credit card networks such as, VISA, MasterCard, etc. These networks act as a gateway between the third-party company (acquirer) servicing the merchants on-line payment and the bank or financial institution (issuer) for authorizing and funding transactions.

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One of the major players in cloud computing – Amazon, are SAS 70 compliant. A small step forward towards safer environments as many commented but I see it as an important move – well done Amazon! As I stated in previous articles, cloud computing has to proof that that it is getting safer and safer. Ernst & Young carried out Amazon’s SAS 70 Type II audit, quite an assurance that the job was done to high standards. This means that remote online backup providers that use Amazon as their backend have one important layer SAS 70 certified, however, the backup service provider remains responsible and should implement the necessary security measure to protect their customers’ data.

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Every solution has its two sides of the coin. We come across various marketing techniques that somehow define cloud computing in relation to the services they provide! In order to jump on to the cloud bandwagon and attract customers, some companies advertise their services as cloud services when in fact these are not! Therefore, what is cloud computing? – We define cloud computing as anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical drawings.

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Very recently, I read an article by W. Curtis Preston (at SearchDataBackup.com) about remote online backup services. As this blog, deals with data backups I would like to comment about some points. W. Curtis Preston is an executive editor at TechTarget and independent backup expert. 

Preston starts his article by pointing out the major setback of remote online backups that is the first full backup execution time and mentions the seating option. The seating option is when a service provider offers the customer to shift a complete set of all data through a physical means such as, removable drives. In addition, he mentions the long backup time that the initial full backup job would take and the bandwidth limitations associated with large uploads of data. This is true and I would consider these factors as the only limitations of remote online backups as we stressed out in our previous articles – click here for more articles - In fact, we both agree that home users and SMBs are the ideal customers of these services.

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