compliance reports
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Compliance Reports

One of the services Amazon provides that is not really a service is compliance reports.  These documents are important to anyone that uses AWS for commercial purposes.  This particular service is also known as AWS Artifact and can be found at this link.  You can also look at the overview at this page. Who Needs Compliance Reports? A small business may never care about compliance reports.  However, these can be very important if your business deals in financial information, credit cards, or personal data.  The compliance reports provide documentation about your environment and can build trust in customers.  These documents are also important for a company that desires ISO certification or wants to pass a security audit. This documentation does not guarantee... Read more

a glacier
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Glacier – Low Cost, Long Term Storage

As we continue our AWS tour, we come to Glacier.  It is Amazon’s solution for long-term storage of large files.  We have discussed their S3 storage solution in a couple of other articles.  However, think of this as the next step in storage. Glacier is Like Offsite Tape Storage If S3 is your hard drive in the cloud, then glacier is your long-term tape archive storage in the cloud.  You can check out what Amazon says about this service here or take our word for it. They provide a couple of tiers of access to Glacier vaults depending on how fast you need to get your data back.  A vault is a location for storing an archive.  The data costs are minimal... Read more

workmail
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon WorkMail – An Introduction

Nearly everyone has a Google mail account these days.  In case you haven’t paid attention, those are the email addresses that end with Gmail.  This makes sense as it is a free service that provides a lot of functionality.  However, it does not allow you to customize your address, nor can you use a company domain.  There is “Google for Business” that provides these options, but before you try that, let’s take a look at Amazon’s competitor WorkMail. WorkMail is Part of a Suite There is a slowly growing suite of services that Amazon categorizes under business productivity.  This category currently includes WorkMail, WorkDocs, and Chime.  We will look at the other services in future posts.  However, there is some benefit... Read more

AWS Tour Logo
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Lightsail – What is it?

We are big fans of the Amazon Web Services army of tools.  Thus, we plan on digging deeper into the various services and will keep you informed of our journey.  In this article, we will look at Amazon Lightsail.  It is a service in their “Compute” group.  It is not free, but instead, has a set monthly cost that is perfect for gauging your development overhead. What Does Lightsail Provide? The Lightsail service, at a high level, is a quick start for EC2 instances.  Lightsail allows the user to set a monthly subscription/cost based on instance size.  The server includes storage and IP allocation.  Our Launch Your Internet Business walks people through this process via the typical steps.  We have found... Read more

care and feeding of a baby
Posted on General

Proper Care and Feeding of Your Business

We have provided a lot of content on the technical details of your business.  All of this is important.  However, it is not all you need for care and feeding of your business.  We have looked at tools and techniques, but we also need to use them to make our company stronger.  It is not uncommon for a business owner to get myopic in their focus so let’s look at some ways to avoid this pitfall. Care and Feeding Defined The first step is to define some terms.  When we talk about the care and feeding of your business, we are looking at two types of work.  There are tasks done in your business.  These are the tasks that are done to... Read more

speed your site to earn a seal of approval
Posted on General

CloudFlare – A Walkthrough

In a prior post, we looked at the CDN provider Cloudflare as an option for speeding up our site.  In this post, we will take the promised deeper dive into their offering.  We will focus on the free features and note the paid ones available. The Cloudflare Dashboard When you log into CloudFlare, you will be able to select a website if you have more than one tied to the account.  Then you will be taken to the dashboard screen.  There is a lot of content on this page.  The main tabs/buttons across the top are: Overview Analytics DNS Crypto Firewall Speed Caching Page Rules Network Traffic Customize Apps Scrape Shield This list may seem like a lot to cover, but... Read more