Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SmiKar Software

Achieving PCI DSS Compliance in the Cloud

In the current digital world, businesses should ensure that they protect cardholders’ data at all costs. As such, any business that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data or any other sensitive information should comply with the latest Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards released in 2018. However, this can be overwhelming for most decision-makers. Below is a guide on how you can achieve PCI DSS compliance for your cloud operations.

How Cloud Technology Can Help Your Business

Between 2019 and 2020, more Australian businesses have turned to cloud computing technologies. A recent survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that businesses using paid cloud computing — IT services used over the internet to access software, computing power, and storage capacity — jumped to 55% from 42% in 2017 to 2018. Indeed, cloud hosting technology is more popular now than ever before.

How to search for an Azure Blob

Simply open up Cloud Storage Manager, then go to the FILE and then SEARCH. Now the Search window will open up in Cloud Storage Manager. Choose the category of the item you want searched for, either an Azure Storage Account, Container, or a Blob can be searched. Type in the name of what you want to search for in the SEARCH box and then finally choose if you want an Exact Match, Starts with, Ends with or Contains, then press Search.

How to find duplicate BLOBs in your Azure Storage Accounts

Azure Storage is like an all you can eat buffet, except the more you eat, the more you pay! This has provided organisations an almost limitless supply of storage, and as we all know, the more that’s available, the more we’ll use. Azure Storage has changed the way many organisations operate both in terms of availability and service.

How to see all your Azure VM Snapshots

Snapshots in Azure is a nice feature that allows you to take a read-only, “point in time” snapshot of a Virtual Machine’s disk. You can take a snapshot of a VM’s OS or data disk. You can use this snapshot to revert the VM to a point in time before an event occurred, or you installed something that didn’t go quite right.

How to get the size of all your Azure Storage Accounts

Do you really ever know how much Azure Storage you are consuming or how many Azure Storage Blobs you have in each of your Storage Accounts? Perhaps you just need an overview of your Azure Storage Account Consumption, including things like the number of Blobs per storage account, Number of Containers, and the Azure Blob Storage Capacity used. All this information is quite easy to gather from one of the several reports available in Cloud Storage Manager.

How to Minimise your Azure Blob Storage Costs

We all know that while Microsoft provides an almost seemingly infinite amount of storage. Compare this to your normal datacentre virtual infrastructure, you often need to do some capacity planning for expected Virtual Machine Compute and Storage way ahead of time. As Microsoft does the capacity planning for you (and everyone else who is using their services), your own Operational Support no longer needs to order disks or more servers to keep up with your business growth and expectations.

How to download an Azure VM

If you require a way to download your Azure Virtual Machine to either your on premise VMware or Hyper-V environment, perhaps because the cost of running that Azure VM is too high, or even for some compliance reason this blog will show you how to quickly download your Azure VM easily with Carbon. No need to download your Azure VM via powershell, or even downloading the VHD from the Azure portal. Carbon will download and convert your Azure VM to your hypervisor of choice with just a few clicks.

How to find Azure BLOB files that haven't been accessed

Azure storage has provided companies with a way to store almost limitless amount of data. But just like kids in a candy store this can get out of hand, and expensive. Being able to store as much data as you want is great, however it is something that can grow to a point where you are spending more on storage than you actually need.