File Server: SMEStorage

We use SkyDrive (25 GB free) in conjunction with Amazon S3 and an in-house PogoPlug installation to store files. We use SMEStorage Cloud File Server to provide a unified view of all of ur files (we are trialling PogoPlug support with them). This also enables us to assign user / file permissions and governance on the consolidated information stores which is very useful. We can also create collaboration groups across the consolidated information stores for sharing with clients and where the files are stored is abstracted (to the client). We also use the service  to managea nd share files on our iPad (tablet) and Windows Phone 7 clients.

CRM: Zoho CRM

Having used several different CRM systems over time, personally we prefer Zoho. For up to 3 users it is free and adding users and services is reasonably priced. It’s also very easy to change the default templates and to use (using the HTML5 mobile App). SalesForce is synonymous with CRM systems and SaaS, but Zoho is good (cheaper) alternative.

Project Management: Basecamp

Basecamp can be a little expensive but if you manage projects and want to collaborate it is hard  to beat as it’s simplicity and easy to use web interface stand the test of time.

Source Code / Bug Tracker: BitBucket

There are many source code and bug tracking systems, many of them free but we like BitBucket. It’s free for up to 3 users and is a solid source code and bug tracker. For source code editing we use Textastic which enables us to hook into specific source files stored on SkyDrive via WebDav using the SMEStorage CloudDav feature which is enabled when the iPad app is purchased.

Analytics: Google

Google Analytics a essential for tracking website statistics. There are alternatives (such as the fantastic Piwik) but it is hard to beat for ease of use. It is not flawless, the lack of ability to track IP addresses (and therefore do a reverse DNS lookup) is frustrating for example. We use AnalyticsPro on the iPad for mobile access/tracking.

Email: Gmail

Google Apps GMail is a great email system. We’ve used it for years and only have good things to say about it. We backup our Gmail to SkyDrive using the SMEStorage Cloud File Server so that it can be indexed and searchable along with our other files, and of course also for resiliency. For offline access on our iPad’s we use a customised version of Remail that we enhanced for the iPad.

Inbound Lead Tracking: Leadlander

LeadLander enables us to track companies visiting our website, how often they visit, and the new people feature enables us to directly contact leads. It’s a great service and great value at a couple of thousand dollars per year.

Server Monitoring: Server Density & Pingdom & WatchMouse & PagerDuty

Server Density is great for monitoring thresholds on Apache, Server Processes, MySQL connections etc. We plug this into PagerDuty so we can be alerted by phone if major thresholds are breached. Server Density also provide an iOS App for push alerts. Pingdom is used an added check for server outages, and WatchMouse is used to check quality of service for times taken to load pages on a site.

MySQL Admin: PHPMyAdmin

We tend to use the command line but if we need to access MySQL graphically we use PHPMyAdmin.

Call Services: e-Receptionist and Skype and TollFreeforwarding

e-Receptionist is great for virtual teams if you want to route calls to Sales / Support etc and you are not physically in the same location. Skype of course needs no explanation, except that we back up our Skype conversations to SkyDrive using the SMEStorage Cloud File Server so they can be indexed and searchable as we do a lot of communication over Skype. TollFreeForwarding is used to give an international number and then route into the e-receptionist infrastructure.

Online Marketing: Google Adwords and BuySellAds.com and LinkedIn Ads

Google Adwords is synonymous with online marketing and can be a great sales tool if used correctly, and BuySellAds is useful to advertise services to targeted sites using banner ads. LinkedIn Ads is a great way to reach a very targeted audience and in our experience is a great way to compliment any online marketing campaign.

Invoicing Services: BlinkSale

Blinksale is a great, simple SaaS invoicing service that is low cost and very easy to use and administer. There are many others but for simplicity you can’t beat BlinkSale.

Blog: WordPress

There are many others, such as Google Sites, and Tumblr, but there are so many ways to use WordPress and so many plug-in’s that there really is nothing else to compete with it.

Social: Twitter and FriendFeed and Identi.ca and Google Plus and Hootsuite

We use a variety of social sites to push out news. There are of course so many now that it would be impossible to list them all but we covered the major ones. If you use multiple Twitter or social accounts then Hootsuite is a must.

……. and there you have it. The types of SaaS cloud services a distributed virtual company can use to run their business.

“A user buys some software over the Internet or Shrink wrapped. They receive it and install it. It either does not work for them or they cannot figure out how to use it so they basically write off the cash and don’t use the App. End of story.”

Now lets looks at what happens on Cloud:

“The user either buys an Application from an App Store be it desktop or mobile, or a holiday from a holiday store, and then decided either the application is rubbish, does not work for them (or they have not RTFM) or has a bad experience on holiday. The user then use Social networks and/or the review forum on the App Store to comment on the bas experience”

In the latter case this “review” and negative experience puts off other people of trying the App / the holiday / the hotel etc. In some cases it can mean the difference between continually selling product or selling nothing as users look at the last bad review and then move somewhere else to continue their search to buy. One person can have the power to seriously undermine your whole product marketing and application strategy.

Even worse, many of the review forums (Apple’s App Store and Google Marketplace come to mind…) don’t even let you post a counter-review to explain that either the user has got it wrong, or misunderstood, or to genuinely offer to correct a bug. Worse still, some vendors can use a strategy of targeting competitive products to “put people off” purchase. In some cases this has led to the vendors involved seeking out legal action.

So what can you do to protect your product and your reputation ?

Well the first step has already been taken, you are at least thinking about it and conscious of it which is half the battle. What you should do is have your marketing or support team have a strategy that includes:

- Monitoring App Stores and review forums where your product features
- Monitoring social media for keywords about your product or company
- Set up Google Alerts keywords to inform you of keywords about your product and company
- Ensure you check your Twitter messages and also posts on LinkedIn and Facebook pages.  These are easily missed.

When you see responses, always make sure to try and follow up with the user and engage and resolve their issue, even if this means refunding them, Even if a refund seems like the last thing you want to do, offer the refund, it is not worth your reputation. As part of the process try and see if they will change their review, even if it is only to neutral.

The Cloud brings power to the masses in more ways than one and a single user can have a dramatic network effect on your business if you are not careful !

“As a social gaming online casino, we knew from the beginning that scalability was critical to our success,” says Hussein Chahine, Yazino’s Founder and CEO. “With XAP, we have the flexibility to meet constantly changing business volumes, with linear, real-time dynamic scalability using a cloud-data center hybrid model.”

Yazino fuses social interaction and multiplayer functionality, building a bridge between traditional online gambling and social gaming sites. Yazino has already registered more than 500,000 players, with more than 10,000 new players joining daily.

XAP provides a unique enterprise-grade, end-to-end application scalability platform, which can handle extremely large volumes, be scaled out (or in) in real-time, and is governed by preset business SLAs, and which is ultra-fast due to the whole platform running in memory. A strategic solution enhancing IT efficiency and agility, it guarantees performance under peak demand while improving hardware utilization by up to 500%. It allows developers to build, deploy, and operate their infrastructures in any environment without a single code change.

“Yazino benefits from our long experience with cloud development,” says Adi Paz, GigaSpaces Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. “With XAP as the underlying infrastructure, our clients like Yazino can focus on the business logic and speed time to market without concern for where the application will actually run.”

By using XAP, Yazino now has a massively multiplayer/multi-game online casino platform optimized for extremely high throughput, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent, interactive players, while giving each player excellent response time.

“GigaSpaces technology helped us build a hybrid infrastructure, where we can leverage the best of the cloud’s economies of scale while ensuring our data center can manage all of the regulatory-related processing,” continued Hussein. “This provides Yazino a valuable competitive edge as we use more costly hosting only for what is required by regulation, while other services sit entirely on the cloud.”

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of virtualized application platforms. Our flagship product, eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), delivers end-to-end scalability across the entire stack, from the data all the way to the application. XAP is the only product that provides a complete in-memory solution on a single platform, enabling high-speed processing of extreme transactional loads, while scaling to meet any requirement – dynamically and linearly. XAP was designed from the ground up to support any cloud environment – private, public, or hybrid – and offers a pain-free, evolutionary path from today’s data center to the technologies of tomorrow.

More than 350 organizations worldwide are leveraging XAP to enhance IT efficiency and performance. Among our customers are Fortune Global 500 companies, including top financial services enterprises, telecom carriers, online gaming providers, and e-commerce companies, such as Dow Jones, NYSE, Société Générale, Virgin Mobile, and Sears.

About Yazino
Yazino, the world’s first social casino (www.yazino.com) was conceived by three friends who wanted to reinvent the social gaming and online casino worlds by connecting the two together. Yazino has built a bridge between traditional online gambling and social gaming sites, creating a whole new hybrid category. The entire brand and in-game experience is entertaining and social to its core. Yazino offers a uniquely fun and competitive environment to connect the world around casino games, such as Blackjack, Roulette, Texas Hold’em and Slots.  Constantly refreshed multiplayer content, tournaments and the engaging challenge of levels and achievements allow Yazino to define the next generation of online gambling.

Yazino, a wholly owned subsidiary of Yazino Group AG (Switzerland), was founded by Hussein Chahine, Bijan Khezri and Gojko Adzic in 2008.

We have quickly seen other providers such as RIM, and Google quickly adopt the same model, with Nokia lagging behind and then news filtering out that they would launch an App Store at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and when they did,  well lets just say that it was not exactly a success.  Microsoft, late to the party as always, are also jumped on the bandwagon with the launch of their “My Phone” service . Samsung have also now launched their own Mobile Applications MarketPlace. This shift has hugely changed the whole model of the Telco market. Nokia, the 100 pound gorilla, is losing market share hand over fist as it struggles to get to grips with this new model. Motorola has lost $3.6 billion as they too struggle to get to grips with this new consumer model.

In 1 year Apple has become the eighth largest mobile phone vendor in the world (source: strategy analytics). This whilst only competing in the smartphone market and, at the time of the report, not selling into markets such as China. Overall during the past March quarter mobile phone sales fell 13% worldwide, the fastest rate of annual decline since record began, but in contrast sales rose 10% in the US, largely because of Apple. The top 5 handset vendors saw their market share fall from 83.5% to 78%, a decline that is predicted to continue as Android comes of age and Apple continues it’s dominance with low-end entry points into the consumer market.

The whole notion of how to sell to an individual has changed, it has become from the edge and back rather than the reverse i.e. it has proved that users are wiling to not only pay for real-time services and just-in-time applications, but will actually choose their handset provider based on the perceived value and breadth of those services. How many times have you read of a competitive phone review, “In some ways it is a better handset than the iPhone but it just cannot match the App Store for breadth of Appllications”. Interestingly not everyone agrees. MobileCrunch recently ran an article, “Not every Company needs an App Store“.  I believe they miss the point. The rules have changed and the humble phone has changed to become a platform to deliver services aided by on-demand cloud applications and services.  

I agree that ideally we would be able to write against one platform for services delivered. Unfortunately the mobile phone OS market is very segmented with lots of players such as Symbian (Nokia), Microsoft, Google, iPhone etc. Having said that their are some initiatives to try and provide some abstraction to allow code / services written for one platform to run on others, such as PhoneGap, which supports iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Ultimately the Genie is out of the bottle and new mobile companies can see the carrot that is new revenue and business models that Apple has made reality. Ultimately the will have no choice, with an Open Source OS model in Android squeezing them from one side, and Apple on the other, the landscape is being changed and the 100 pound gorilla is starting to look like an endangered species. Figures compiled by Gartner show that Apples Market share more than doubled in 2008, whilst Nokia’s Market share of the global smartphone Market fell from 47% in 2007 to 31% in 2008, and based on projections in the Gartner analysis, this would make Apple the leading global smartphone provider by 2011.

Software that purports to scale the applications on the cloud is not new, have a look at our prior blog post on this topic, and you will see some of the usual suspects such as RightScale, and Scalr. A new offering in this space is by Tibco with its Tibco Silver offering. Tibco Silver is trying to solve the problem of not whether cloud services can scale but whether the applications themselves can scale with them. This problem is addressed by Silver through ‘self aware elasticity’. Hmmm….sounds good but what exactly does that mean ? It means the system can automatically provision new cloud capacity (be that storage or compute) dependent upon fluctuations in application usage.

According to Tibco, unlike services in a service-oriented architecture cloud services are not aware of the SLA’s to which they are required to adhere and Tibco Silver is aimed at providing this missing functionality. Tibco claim that “Self-aware elasticity” is something no other vendor has developed. I would dispute this. GigaSpaces XAP with it’s ability to deploy to the cloud as well as on-premise using the same technology has very fine grained application level SLA control that when breached allows the application to react accordingly, whether this be to increase the number of threads, provision new instances or to distribute workloads in a different way. GigaSpaces Service Grid technology enables support for this real-times elasticity.  The GigaSpaces Service Grid originated from Sun’s RIO Project. (interestingly it seems GigaSpaces are doing some work on enabling their cloud tools to deploy to and manage VMWARE images on private clouds as they do with AMI’s on Amazon’s public cloud) 

Without a doubt the ability to react in real-time to application level SLA’s rather than just breaches of an SLA at an infrastructure level is something that will find a welcome home in both private and public clouds.

- Compute @ $0.12 / hour
- Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
- Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

- Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
- Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB.

The Windows Azure blog details a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability. The Azure SDK can be downloaded here.

It remains to be seen how Azure pans out but I am sure it will be a serious cloud player and it is nice to see a little pressure put on Amazon not only in terms of pricing but also for the intellectual ‘one-man upmanship’ this is sure to bring which can only be good for all companies working with cloud.

 Earlier this year I wrote about Amazon Elastic MapReduce and the ways in which it can be used to process large data sets on a cluster of processors. Since the announcement, our customers have wholeheartedly embraced the service and have been doing some very impressive work with it (more on this in a moment).

Today I am pleased to announce Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows can now be run in our European region. You can launch jobs in Europe by simply choosing the new region from the menu. The jobs will run on EC2 instances in Europe and usage will be billed at those rates.

 Because the input and output locations for Elastic MapReduce jobs are specified in terms of URLs to S3 buckets, you can process data from US-hosted buckets in Europe, storing the results in Europe or in the US. Since this is an internet data transfer, the usual EC2 and S3 bandwidth charges will apply.

Our customers are doing some interesting things with Elastic MapReduce.

 At the recent Hadoop Summit, online shopping site ExtraBux described their multi-stage processing pipeline. The pipeline is fed with data supplied by their merchant partners. This data is preprocessed on some EC2 instances and then stored on a collection of Elastic Block Store volumes.The first MapReduce step processes this data into a common format and stores it in HDFS form for further processing. Additional processing steps transform the data and product images into final form for presentation to online shoppers. You can learn more about this work in Jinesh Varia’s Hadoop Summit Presentation.

Online dating site eHarmony is also making good use of Elastic MapReduce, processing tens of gigabytes of data representing hundreds of millions of users, each with several hundred attributes to be matched. According to an article on SearchCloudComputing.com, they are doing this work for $1,200 per month, a considerable savings from the $5,000 per month that they estimated it would cost them to do it internally.

We’ve added some articles to our Resource Center to help you to use Elastic MapReduce in your own applications. Here’s what we have so far:

• Developer Peter Skomoroch wrote about Finding Similar Items with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop Streaming. This comprehensive article shows how to run a multi-stage processing pipeline to compute pairwise similarity in a large database of items using the Pearson correlation coefficient.  
•  We also have an article on Processing and Loading Data from Amazon S3 to the Vertica Analytic Database. This article shows how to use Elastic MapReduce to load the some Freebase data using the MapReduce model. The Map phase converts tab-delimited values into quoted strings and does some other data cleanup. The Reduce phase then performs batch insert operations, which the Vertica JDBC driver transforms into bulk loads. The code resides in a customer JAR and the article shows how to arrange for it to be loaded at run-time.  
•  If you want to learn more about Elastic MapReduce, you should definitely check out our Introduction to Elastic MapReduce. This PDF walkthrough will introduce you to the service with an example which shows you how to load data into Amazon SimpleDB.  

You should also check out AWS Evangelist Jinesh Varia in this video from the Hadoop Summit:

– Jeff;

PS – If you have a lot of data that you would like to process on Elastic MapReduce, don’t forget to check out the new AWS Import/Export service. You can send your physical media to us and we’ll take care of loading it into Amazon S3 for you.

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsourcing and even internal enterprise centre management, as well as from experience with vendors such as Amazon and FlexiScale.

Licensing: If you are using the cloud for spikes or overspill make sure that the products you want to use in the cloud can be used in this way. Certain products restrict their licenses to be used from a cloud perspective. This is especially true of commercial Grid, HPC or DataGrid vendors.

Data transfer costs:  When using a provider like Amazon with a detailed cost model, make sure that any data transfers are internal to the provider network rather than external. In the case of Amazon, internal traffic is free but you will be charged for any traffic over the external IP addresses.

Latency: If you have low latency requirements then the Cloud may not be the best environment to achieve this. If you are trying to run an ERP or some such system in the cloud then the latency may be good enough but if you are trying to run a binary or FX Exchange then of course the latency requirements are very different and more stringent. It is essential to make sure you understand the performance requirements of your application and have a clear understanding of what is deemed business critical.

One Grid vendor who has focused on attacking low latency in the cloud is GigaSpaces and so if you require cloud low latency then these are one of the companies you should evaluate. Also for processing distributed data loads there is the map reduce pattern and Hadoop. These type of architectures eliminating the boundaries created by scale-out database based approaches.

State: Check whether your cloud infrastructure providers have persistence.  When an application is brought down and then back up all local changes will be wiped and you start with a blank slate. This obviously has ramifications with instances that need to store user or application state.  To combat this on their platform Amazon rdelivered EC2 persistent storage in which data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. You should ensure you understand the state limitations of any Cloud Computing platform that you work with.

Data Regulations: If you are storing data in the cloud you may be breaching data laws depending where your data is stored i.e. which country or continent.  To combat this Amazon S3 now supports location constraints, which allow you to specify where in the world to store data for a bucket and provides a new API to retrieve the location constraint for an existing bucket. However if you are using another cloud provider you should check where your data is stored.

Dependencies:  Be aware of dependencies of service providers. If service ‘y’ is dependant on ‘x’ then if you subscribe to service ‘y’ and service ‘x’ goes down you lose your service. Always check any dependencies when you are using a cloud service.

Standardisation: A major issue with current cloud computing platforms is that there is no standardisation of the APIs and platform technologies that underpin the services provided. Although this represents a lack of maturity you need to consider how locked in you are when considering a Cloud platform or migrating between cloud computing platforms will be very difficult if not impossible. This may not be an issue if your supplier is IBM and always likely to be IBM, but it will be an issue if you are just dipping your toe in the water and discover that other platforms are better suited to your needs.

Security: Lack of security or apparent lack of security is one of the perceived major drawbacks of working with Cloud platform and Cloud technology. When moving sensitive data about or storing it in public cloud it should be encrypted. And it is important to consider a secure ID mechanism for authentication and authorisation for services. As with normal enterprise infrastructures only open the ports needed and consider installing a host based intrusion detection systems such as OSSEC. The advantage of working with an enterprise Cloud provider, such as IBM or Sun is that many of these security optimisations are already taken care of. See our prior blog entry for securing n-tier and distributed applications on the cloud.

Compliance:  Regulatory controls mean that certain applications may not be able to deployed in the Cloud. For example the US Patriot Act could have very serious consequences for non-US firms considering U.S. hosted cloud providers. Be aware that often cloud computing platforms are made up of components from a variety of vendors who may themselves provide computing in a variety of legal jurisdictions. Be very aware of the dependencies and ensure you factor this into any operational risk management assessment. See also our prior blog entry on this topic

Quality of service: You will need to ensure that the behaviour and effectiveness of the cloud application that you implement can be measured and tracked both to meet existing or new Service Level agreements. We have discussed previously some of the tools that come with this option built in (GigaSpaces) and other tools that provide functionality that enable you to use this with your Cloud Architecture (RightScale, Scalr etc). Achieving Quality of Service will encompass scaling, reliability, service fluidity, monitoring, management and system performance.

System hardening: Like all enterprise application infrastructures you need to harden the system so that it is secure, robust, and achieves the necessary functional requirements that you need. See our prior blog entry on system hardening for Amazon EC2.

PCI DSS is a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security and was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. Inc. International, to help facilitate the broad adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis.

The PCI DSS is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. This comprehensive standard is intended to help organizations proactively protect customer account data.

So, is it possible to create a PCI DSS compliant application that can be deployed to EC2 ?

In order for an application or system to become PCI DSS compliant requires an end to end system design (or a review if pre-existing) and implementation.  In the case of AWS customer’s attaining PCI compliance (certification), they would have to ensure they met all of the prescribed requirements through the use of encryption etc. very much like other customers have done with HIPAA applications.  The AWS design allows for customers with varying security and compliance requirements to build to those standards in a customized way.

There are different levels of PCI compliance and the secondary level is quite a straight forward configuration, but requires additional things such as 3^rd party external scanning (annually).  You can find an example here of the PCI Scan report that is done on a quarterly basis for the Amazon platform.  This isn’t meant to be a replacement for the annual scan requirement. Customers undergoing PCI certification should have a dedicated scan that includes their complete solution, therefore certifying the entire capability, not just the Amazon infrastructure.

 The principles and accompanying requirements, around which the specific elements of the DSS are organized are:

 Build and Maintain a Secure Network

Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data

Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters Protect Cardholder Data

Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data

Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program

Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software

Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications Implement Strong Access Control Measures

Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know

Requirement 8: Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access

Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data Regularly Monitor and Test Networks

Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data

Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes Maintain an Information Security Policy

Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security

Many of these requirements can’t be met strictly by a datacenter provider, but in Amazon’s case, they will be able to provide an SAS70 Type 2 Audit Statement in July that will provide much of the infrastructure information needed to meet PCI DSS certification.  The Control Objectives that the Amazon Audit will address are:

 Control Objective 1: Security Organization:  Management sets a clear information security policy. The policy is communicated throughout the organization to users

 Control Objective 2: Amazon Employee Lifecycle:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that procedures have been established so that Amazon employee accounts are added, modified and deleted in a timely manner and reviewed on a periodic basis to reduce the risk of unauthorized / inappropriate access

 Control Objective 3: Logical Security:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that unauthorized internal and external access to data is appropriately restricted

Control Objective 4: Access to Customer Data:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that access to customer data is managed by the customer and appropriately segregated from other customers

Control Objective 5: Secure Data Handling:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that data handling between customer point of initiation to Amazon storage location is secured and mapped accurately

 Control Objective 6: Physical Security:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that physical access to Amazon’s operations building and the data centers is restricted to authorized personnel

Control Objective 7: Environmental Safeguards:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that procedures exist to minimize the effect of a malfunction or physical disaster to the computer and data center facilities

Control Objective 8: Change Management:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that changes (including emergency / non-routine and configuration) to existing IT resources are logged, authorized, tested, approved and documented.

Control Objective 9: Data Integrity, Availability and Redundancy:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that data integrity is maintained through all phases including transmission, storage and processing and the Data Lifecycle is managed by customers

Control Objective 10: Incident Handling:  Controls provide reasonable assurance that system problems are properly recorded, analyzed, and resolved in a timely manner.

Many thanks to Carl from Amazon for his help with this information.

Update: Since this post was published Amazon updated their PCI DSS FAQ. You can find that here.