Running a business in the digital age is no easy feat. This is especially true nowadays as cybersecurity threats continue to evolve and increase.

Data breaches have hit even some of the largest, multinational companies, exposing sensitive user data and compromising the privacy and trust of their customers. When it’s payment card data that leaks on a large scale, the damage goes far beyond consumer confidence.

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.

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.)

VGS has achieved PCI L1 Service Provider certification for the third time! Though most of you reading this blog will go through PCI DSS compliance for merchants, the process is similar enough that sharing a few lessons we have learned along the way should be helpful.

PCI DSS certification is a complex endeavor, whether it’s your first time or whether it has become an annual ritual at your company. However, many important aspects (and challenges) are common to all successful PCI assessments.

At VGS, we often get asked by prospective customers about the true costs of PCI. We’ve written about this topic before in broad strokes. Ultimately, the potential costs of PCI non-compliance are catastrophic, both financially and reputationally. But those big numbers can be scary and seem unreal. So let’s put a good summertime analogy to work in explaining how costs arise for two different market players - a small merchant and a SaaS platform with integrated payments.

As divided as the U.S. may be in recent years, there’s at least one issue the vast majority of us seem to agree on: the price of healthcare is out of control.

As healthcare costs continue to inflate faster than other goods or services, healthcare premiums also grow. Whether through an employer or direct, people are often stuck with higher-deductible health plans just to be covered. Out-of-pocket costs for copays or the deductible can result in debt, unpaid bills, or perhaps worst of all, the person choosing not to get care.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know what PCI is and you may also have some inclination that it can be a pain in the you-know-what, too. Just how severe that pain can be is something else altogether.

Data ownership of your payments data (particularly card data) is especially important because no other bank or financial product will generate as much insightful data about your customers as your card payment products. It can lead to insights that lead to making the right offers or even development of the right products and services.

Do you own your data?
Your journey of payments transformation and innovation starts and ends with data ownership. Access to your data is essential.

Secure Your E-commerce Transactions for Compliance and Monetize the Value of Your Data

As you consider how to collect payments for your e-commerce business, you will also have to consider which form of payments to accept. The most widely accepted form of payment for e-commerce is card payment. As a result, you’ll have to determine how to collect card payment information in a PCI compliant manner.

Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance is a beast, and implementing data security best practices requires work from hard-to-acquire talent. This can lead to an unintended breach of privacy in even the most security-conscious company.

Have you ever considered the relationship between the PCI DSS QSA and your business? When you are looking to become PCI DSS compliant and protect your consumer’s sensitive data, your Qualified Security Assessor becomes invaluable. Not only does a PCI QSA conduct your PCI DSS audit, but they are also the only person capable of providing you with a Report on Compliance (RoC).

How sure are you that your company’s data security falls outside of PCI scope? Did you know that even if your application never keeps cardholder data in persistent storage, you still might have to meet the PCI Data Security Standard’s stringent requirements.

2020 has been a year like no other. In response to these unprecedented times, companies are needing help from wherever they can get it as they try to restart. This is why Very Good Security is announcing a special free tokenization solution offer.

So, you’re a small business owner with a startup that needs to demonstrate compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Regardless of your business type, if your organization needs to become PCI compliant, that means you plan on operating on cardholder data and you have a responsibility to protect that sensitive credit card information.

Tokenization has been a hot topic in the payments industry for some time, now used by financial institutions in transaction processing all around the world. Companies use tokenization systems to keep sensitive data, like credit card numbers and bank account numbers, safe while still being able to store and use the information.

It’s common knowledge that sensitive information, like payment card data, shouldn’t be sent through email in an unencrypted state. There is simply too much information security risk, and too many opportunities for cybercriminals to intercept that data.

Is your organization connecting to a payment gateway, processor, or other financial institution – like FIS or I2C – that requires you to use ISO8583 to handle payment messaging?

If so, you likely already know that your business needs to achieve some form of PCI compliance in order to handle the sensitive data contained within those messages.

Attaining PCI compliance for small businesses is no small feat, but securing sensitive cardholder data in a PCI compliant manner is easier, faster, and more affordable with an end-to-end PCI compliance solution - like VGS.

Small businesses, from e-commerce merchants to service providers, all need to ask themselves the same question early in the lifespan of their company: do I need PCI compliance?

If you work with payment cards, including both debit and credit cards, then the answer is yes - you do need to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The importance of compliance in a company’s lifespan and overall strategy cannot be overstated.

The digital era has unleashed endless possibilities for launching e-commerce businesses. From independent home-based Amazon merchants to large-scale online retail operations, the barriers to entry in the e-commerce space have drastically fallen.

These days, it seems that companies are having to navigate increasingly complex data compliance regulations. From following PCI DSS rules to maintaining HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA compliance, the complicated web of global regulatory frameworks for data protection just keeps getting more and more tangled.

In the context of data protection, modern digital businesses realize the dangers that come with using sensitive information in its raw form. Figuring out a way to collect and use the original data without putting it at risk remains a challenge, and organizations must channel a lot of their resources into IT security that protects their users’ sensitive data like credit card numbers and other cardholder information.

With so many highly-publicized data breaches hitting newspaper headlines in recent years, including a massive Capital One data breach in 2019, it has become more important than ever to protect sensitive consumer data and limit its exposure to data leaks.

The next era of data security is already upon us, and it involves washing our hands of sensitive user data entirely.

Imagine a world where your business doesn’t have to worry about managing its own Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, simply because sensitive cardholder data never passes through your systems in the first place.

It’s a concept we call Zero Data.

The hard-to-face reality is that billions of personal records are exposed each year. A commonly used, yet incomplete solution, is tokenization. Tokenizing sensitive data does not eliminate the need to achieve and certify PCI DSS compliance.
In order to completely descope from PCI, a business can partner with a data custodian (VGS) that handles 100% of data capture and vaulting – removing any compliance risk and completely avoiding data leaks.

Learn how you can make sure that your company’s cardholder data environment (CDE) is compliant with PCI DSS.

Storing PCI cardholder data can make business much easier, for both you and your customers. Unfortunately, stored cardholder data puts your business at risk of a data breach - which is why the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was put in place.

Ensuring a company’s cardholder data environment (CDE) is compliant with PCI standards is no easy task, however, and often requires unanticipated additional resources and ongoing efforts to maintain.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with our friends at Netlify to develop an add-on that effortlessly and securely collects data via webforms.

Today, we’re happy to announce the introduction of our new Compliance Academy, a resource where you can learn all about compliances and regulations such as PCI, SOC2, GDPR and CCPA.

In the last 2 years at VGS we’ve seen a significant uptick in interest regarding regulation. Every day we field multiple questions from people trying to understand if their company is “in scope” and if so, what they need to do about it. There are a number of reasons for this interest but primarily it appears to be driven by uncertainty. Both startups and established companies alike face the prospect of a world with increased regulation and significantly stiffer penalties for failure to comply.

If you have an API that interacts with credit card data, before using your API in the wild you'll need to make sure it is secure and PCI compliant.

One straightforward solution for this is to redact every credit card number that goes through your API. If you have a Java-based web application that uses the Spring framework, what would you do? Would you use a third party or find your own way to solve this problem?

Very Good Security, Inc. (VGS), a global leader in secure cloud services, data protection, and compliance, announced today that its data centers and cloud infrastructure have successfully completed its annual PCI DSS 3.2 compliance.

PCI Compliance, a Modern Approach: Audit Scope Reduction

Companies who stay within PCI scope when handling cardholder data have to deal with high maintenance costs and lengthy compliance certification processes - which is why many businesses seek to reduce their scope.