Cloud Hosting is Secure for Take-off: Mosso Enables The Spreadsheet Store, an Online Merchant, to become PCI Compliant

// March 5th, 2009 // In the news

Cloud Sites, Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud’s Flagship offering, is officially the very first cloud hosting solution to enable an Internet merchant to pass PCI Compliance scans for both McAfee’s PCI scans and McAfee Secure Site scans. This achievement occurred just after Computer World published an article where some CIO’s shared their concern that Cloud Computing is still limited to “things that don’t require full levels of security.”  This landmark breakthrough may be the beginning of an answer to those fears, as Mosso leads Cloud Hosting towards a solid future of trust and reliability.

“We are making the Cloud business-ready.  Online merchants, like The Spreadsheet Store can now benefit from the scalability of the Cloud without compromising the security of online transactions,” says Emil Sayegh, General Manager of Mosso|The Rackspace Cloud.  “We are thrilled to have worked with The Spreadsheet Store to prepare the Cloud for their online transactions.”

Philip Murphy, Vice President of Operations for The Spreadsheet Store, was relatively happy with the dedicated servers that The Spreadsheet Store was using – until he caught the buzz of the cloud.  As an online provider of feature-rich Microsoft Excel templates, Murphy and company help individuals run their businesses and their lives.  His spreadsheets cover every topic from dieting to Wall Street, serving as a sort of personal assistant in managing the day-to-day.  To accommodate for trends and flexes in consumer needs, The Spreadsheet Store sought the scalability of the Cloud, but – there was one catch – How do you pass a PCI scan on the Cloud?  Enter Mosso.

“We liked the idea of Cloud scalability, pay for what you use, etc.  We also liked the fact that Mosso is affiliated with Rackspace, which has a great reputation.  Our only concern was security in the cloud.  As an internet merchant, we take security seriously and wanted to find a cloud hosting provider who could enable PCI compliant hosting.  Mosso fit the bill.  In working with Mosso, our site now passes McAfee PCI scans and McAfee Secure Site scans on Cloud Sites.”

The Spreadsheet Store set up their site using aspdotnetstorefront, “Which is, in our opinion, the best shopping cart solution on the market today,” says Murphy.  “It also happens to be fully compatible with Mosso.”  Using Authorize.Net, a secure payment gateway, to handle credit card transaction, The Spreadsheet Store does not store any credit card information on the servers.  Murphy and team use MaxMind for fraud prevention, Cardinal Commerce for MasterCard Secure Code and Verified by Visa, McAfee for PCI and daily vulnerability scans, and Thawte for SSL certification.

And how hard was this process?  “The combination of aspdotnetstorefront and Mosso make implementing these security features a breeze,” continued Murphy.  “I am more than impressed with the Mosso platform.  The uptime is top-notch, the support is best-in-class with live help available 24/7, and the security is tougher than any cloud platform we have seen.”

Want to see for yourself?  Take a look at our step-by-step instructions and take your first steps toward becoming PCI compliant.

So, ladies and gentlemen – the padlock has clicked and the cloud is secure for take-off.  Sit back, relax, and enjoy the silver lining.