BLOG, NEWS & UPDATES

Introduction to OpenStack Swift Object Storage

This article is a general introduction to Swift, OpenStack's Object Storage.  We will cover the following topics: what Swift is, what kind of data you can store in Swift, how Swift controls access to your data, how Swift protects that ...
Read More
/ Cloud, Online Data Storage, OpenStack

Looking to run OpenStack on Azure? The wait’s over!

Would Microsoft Azure service ever become an OpenStack cloud? As reported by Jeffrey Schwartz in Redmond Magazine , "that looks unlikely anytime soon based on statements by company [Microsoft] officials..". Whether Microsoft will support OpenStack, he concludes, is not a decision that ...
Read More
/ Cloud

Summary of the Twelve PCI DSS Requirements

Let's suppose that you need to handle credit card data in your computing environment.  Let's suppose further than you can't use something like Point-To-Point encryption to vastly reduce your PCI scope.  The PCI DSS standard defines twelve high level requirements ...
Read More
/ PCI

Widows Azure Pack/Swift Integration

Windows Azure Pack (WAP) is Microsoft's private cloud offering.  It offers a subset of the features found in Azure, Microsoft's public cloud.  What makes WAP nice for the user is that the portal and APIs are the same in both ...
Read More
/ Azure, Cloud

Seven Lessons Learned from PCI

OutworX became a PCI-capable development organisation quite some time ago.  Those who have trod the road to PCI compliance know that it is not an easy task.  Here are some reflections on lessons we learned along the way, these will ...
Read More
/ Compliance, PCI

Setting up Point-to-Site OpenVPN on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure has some nice paid services for creating site-to-site VPN.  Using these, you can create a hybrid cloud that connects your enterprise network to a Virtual Network on Azure.  But if you just want connect to a single Azure ...
Read More
/ Cloud

Preconfigured Linux Images on Microsoft Azure. Part II – Running a Community Instance

Microsoft Azure has community based Linux images in VM Depot.  In a previous blog, we showed how to copy a community image to you own Azure account.  In this post, we talk about how to boot an instance from that ...
Read More
/ Cloud

Preconfigured Linux Images on Microsoft Azure. Part I – Getting Community Images

When most people think of Microsoft Azure, they think of Windows servers.  But Azure also supports popular Linux operating systems including Ubuntu, SUSE, CentOS, and Oracle Linux. When you create a new Virtual Machine in the Azure Portal, it offers ...
Read More
/ Cloud

Storage Policies Coming to OpenStack Swift

The good folks at OpenStack recently announced two big new features in Swift for the Juno time frame: Storage Policies and Erase Codes. These new features are going to improve the accessibility that functionability of Swift. Here is all you need to ...
Read More

Addressing the Bandwidth Problem with Hybrid Clouds

One of the problems with hybrid clouds is the bandwidth limitation between your private cloud in the enterprise and a public cloud provider.  The communications link can quickly become a bottleneck when one cloud tries to access data in the ...
Read More
/ Cloud