Owning a business is a difficult job. Keep reading this article to learn how PCI compliance services can help your business.
What are PCI Compliance Services?
PCI compliance is the process of ensuring that a business can accept credit card payments without compromising the security of customer data. It’s an important part of running any e-commerce business and is especially important for online retailers.
If your business accepts credit cards, you must follow these standards to ensure you are protecting customer information. With this, it is essential to hire PCI compliance services.
What Does It Do?
PCI compliance services will perform an assessment of your current environment, identify any vulnerabilities, recommend ways to increase security and ensure you comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). You can then take action on these recommendations and implement them so that you are actively protecting your organisation from cybercrime.
The assessment may include vulnerability scans, vulnerability management services, penetration testing, firewall assessments, and ongoing vulnerability management.
These tests should be performed at least annually or when significant changes have been made to your network architecture.
Four Main Benefits of PCI Compliance Services
PCI compliance services are very important for businesses and organisations that store, process, or transmit cardholder data. Here are more benefits of PCI compliance services:
- PCI DSS Compliance
Achieving PCI compliance services helps organisations secure customer data by ensuring that companies have implemented appropriate security controls to protect sensitive customer information.
- Cost Savings
The costs associated with implementing PCI compliance services can be significant, but there are ways to reduce those costs. For example, if you choose to outsource your PCI compliance audit, you will not only save time but also money because you will not have to spend resources on hiring staff or updating software systems or hardware devices.
- PCI Audit Preparation Services
Experts will ensure that you are ready for an audit by providing assistance in identifying necessary documentation and preparing all the documents required by the auditor.
- Reduces False Positives
The PCI DSS standards are complex and have multiple interpretations, which can lead to false positives in your self-assessment tests. You don’t want to be paying for unnecessary fixes because you misinterpreted something, so you need to hire PCI Compliance Services.
Why Is It Important?
Any company that handles credit card payments needs PCI compliance. Without it, customers may not be able to use their cards with your company.
Furthermore, while PCI compliance isn’t difficult to achieve, it can be time-consuming. You need to establish a safe payment system and monitor the rules of your sellers. You can be certain the procedure will go smoothly for your company with the aid of PCI Compliance Services.
If you are a merchant and handle payment card information in any way, you need to be PCI compliant. This means that your systems, software, and employees must follow these security standards in order to prevent unauthorised access to or theft of credit card information. If you fail to comply with these standards, your business could be fined a lot, and if someone’s identity or financial information is stolen as a result of non-compliance, then the fines could go even higher!
PCI Compliance Services in More Detail
If your company accepts credit or debit cards as payment, it must comply with PCI DSS guidelines to protect cardholder information and prevent data breaches. Since penalties for single data breaches can run into millions of dollars in fines and loss of business, ensuring compliance is essential if it is not already happening.
The PCI DSS set of security standards comprises 12 main requirements and over 300 sub-requirements that reflect security best practises. These include protecting cardholder data transmission over open or public networks, not using vendor-supplied default passwords and security parameters, installing and maintaining a firewall configuration that adequately safeguards payment card environments, and not sharing access with noncompliant parties.
Monitoring and auditing activities involving cardholder data are of equal importance, necessitating a documented list of users with their roles and the data required for their job functions as well as an access control method and process for reviewing audit logs.
One of the more difficult requirements of PCI DSS for small businesses may be documenting how data flows into and through their organisation, how often it gets accessed, and any access requests. You will require software solutions to log and secure this data once it reaches your network.
Maintain a list of systems with access to cardholder data and primary account numbers (PAN). This may include physical locations, cloud providers, e-commerce websites, call centres, and remote employees that could potentially have access to the card data you collect. Also included should be software products, firewalls, and networking components that could hold this card data—servers, desktops, laptops, etc.
Finalise by ensuring all cardholder data stored is encrypted, truncated, or tokenized (not just credit or debit card numbers) using backup procedures and recovery processes that you have put into place. This should include databases where cardholder data resides as well as backup and recovery procedures in place.
Establishing and maintaining PCI compliance can be challenging yet essential for any business that accepts payment card payments and strives for growth. If you don’t have time to go through each of these requirements on your own, partnering with an MSSP will enable you to build and manage a comprehensive compliance programme with minimal hassle.