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PCI compliance is an industry-standard set to keep sensitive payment data safe. Any business that handles credit or debit cardholder data must achieve PCI compliance. It was created by a council of major credit card providers – the PCI Security Standards Council, or PCI SSC – to help prevent credit and debit card data theft.

Unsure what exactly you need to know about PCI Compliance? Here’s a crash course on the PCI Data Security Standard, including the most cost-effective path to securing cardholder data, PCI compliance best practices and benefits, what it takes to get PCI certified, and much more.

We’re excited to announce the launch of VGS Notifications to proactively inform customers about events in their live integration with VGS. The first delivery method we offer is via webhooks, which is one of the fastest ways to track events.

Time for an old joke: during the war, an Italian spy was captured, tied to a chair, and interrogated -- unsuccessfully -- for hours. The spy’s captors finally gave up and threw the spy into a jail cell. Fellow prisoners were impressed and asked how the spy could withstand interrogation. The Italian replied, “Well, I wanted to tell them everything ... but I couldn’t move my hands!”

In the world of data security, keeping secrets is no joke. In espionage, your agent might be captured. In business, your data might be captured. Both are bad, whether you’re in Italy or anywhere else.

VGS is proud to announce the new VGS Trust Center. Built-in collaboration with SafeBase.io, the Trust Center gives customers and partners a place to instantly search the entire VGS security program database, from network diagrams to access control, cyber insurance, penetration testing, and much more. It’s an all-in-one resource to answer almost any question about how VGS secures our environment to keep your data secure.

Humans have not been to the Moon in fifty years, but the space race is hotter than ever. In 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our Solar System with a copy of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In 2020, a Chinese lunar rover explored what lies beneath the Moon’s surface with ground-penetrating radar. Last week, Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, which created so much debris that astronauts aboard the International Space Station prepared for possible evacuation. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to send humans to Mars by 2024.

Note: Throughout this piece, I will be referring to Jordan McKee’s excellent playbook on optimizing payment systems for the coming decade, Moving Payments From Commodity to Commerce Catalyst Through Optimization and Orchestration. It is behind a subscriber wall, but I encourage you to check it out, along with all the fine work Jordan and his team are doing in this space.†

Do you know how long it takes to become PCI compliant?

Fulfilling all the requirements spelled out in the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a complicated process with a ton of moving pieces.

Achieving Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) can be a lengthy and expensive process.

Level 1 compliance, which is required for businesses that handle high volumes of payment card data, can easily cost over $1M upfront. In addition, the journey to your certification can last between 9 to 12 months if you opt to build your own PCI-compliant infrastructure and manage the audit process by yourself. (And that doesn’t even account for annual maintenance.)

My Kingdom for a Horse!

In his play King Richard the Third, William Shakespeare wrote that the death of a single horse can bring down an entire kingdom. In 2018, hackers proved something similar in the world of cybercrime. By injecting a mere 22 lines of code into the supply chain of the British Airways website, the bad guys made off with 500,000 credit card numbers.

What It Is & Why It Matters

Many of us can remember our introduction to the power of compound interest at a young age. Maybe it was a grade school math teacher narrating the rice and chessboard fable or an early financial literacy course scaring you into saving for retirement by quoting Einstein: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it … he who doesn't pays it.”