Microsoft Windows Azure has earned level ‘Level 1 complaint’ status under Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) thereby making it easier for its customers to achieve PCI DSS certification.
The PCI DSS certification, designed to thwart credit-card frauds, is required for all organisations that store and process payment card data of its customers. Microsoft revealed that by providing infrastructure and platform services that have been validated under PCI DSS requirements, Windows Azure delivers a platform on which customers will be able to host their own secure applications, which they can get PCI DSS certified.
“Today’s announcement means customers can now deploy applications and have them certified, so this opens up Azure for a new type of workload”, wrote Microsoft Technical Evangelist Niall Moran in a blog post.
Microsoft has made available Windows Azure PCI Attestation of Compliance and Windows Azure Customer PCI Guide to help its customers attain PCI DSS certification.
Microsoft has also announced general availability of Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager, a disaster recovery offering, that basically automates the process of virtual machine replication to a secondary, external site.
[Source: Scott Guthrie’s blog]
