Archive for the ‘hype’ tag
Mosso’s disingenuous PCI-compliance claim
I’m a big fan of RackSpace and their Mosso product. The Mosso team has done a great job by continually tweaking their products to add more functionality and value. They have made intelligent purchases (JungleDisk/SliceHost) and are using their considerable resources to make a lasting impact on the cloud computing landscape. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of their smart, passionate employees (Rackers) and can personally vouch for their fanatical service. My company, ServiceCloud, has been a RackSpace partner for a couple of years and, when the fit makes sense, we proudly recommend RackSpace/Mosso to our clients.
That being said, I’m disappointed in Mosso for putting out a more-hype-than-substance announcement. Mosso recently announced that they’ve enabled one of their clients to be PCI-compliant on the Mosso cloud. When I saw this, I wondered how it was possible, but as I read closer it became clear that it was just a trick! It seems that their “PCI-compliant” solution requires Mosso not to store any information that requires PCI compliance. Instead they offload the burden of compliance to a third-party payment gateway (Authorize.Net). Chris Hoff and Craig Balding have written excellent articles explaining this trickery.
While what they say in the announcement is technically true, it’s misleading at best and does the fine team at Mosso/RackSpace a disservice. There is enough hype in cloud computing. We expect more from a market leader like Mosso. They clearly don’t need to stretch the truth in order to make news…they should just talk about their real accomplishments.
Update: The General Manager of Mosso, Emil Sayegh, pinged me on Twitter and mentioned that Greg Hrncir, Mosso’s Director of Operations, responded to the criticisms on Craig’s site. There also seems to be a healthy back-and-forth at Hoff’s site. It’s great to see that Mosso is interested in having a dialog about this issue and I’m looking forward to see how this unfolds.