UnderstandingPCI Compliance

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2 | Understanding PCI Compliance | cognoscape.com

UnderstandingPCI Compliance

What is PCI Compliance?

What exactly is PCI compliance? “PCI” stands for Payment Card Industry, and the compliance component ensures that all businesses dealing with credit card payments follow the right security standards to protect their employee and customer payment card data. The PCI SSC (Security Standards Council) is made up of five major credit card companies including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB (Japanese Credit Bureau). The PCI Council formed a body of security standards known as PCI DSS (Data Security Standard). These standards consist of twelve requirements that meet a variety of security goals and helps businesses measure their own payment card security policies, procedures and guidelines. The Council’s main duties involve maintaining, evolving, and promoting PCI security standards as well as providing necessary tools needed for implementation of the standards.

The most prominent standard when it comes to PCI compliance deals with reducing the risk of credit and debit payment card data loss. The PCI DSS not only covers what security objectives need to be covered, but also what steps you can take in order to become secure.

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Why Does PCI Compliance Matter to My Business?

If your company accepts credit card payments, then it’s essential that you have a system in place to store, process, and host sensitive credit card data securely. This is where we come in – offering an array solutions and services to secure PCI compliance, Cognoscape is your go-to PCI compliance ensurer.

Nobody wants to tarnish their company’s reputation by exposing their employees’ and customers’ confidential data to harmful criminals and hackers. This can destroy your business and lead to a significant loss of profit and increased downtime – nobody likes the sound of that. Attackers are increasingly focusing on small and mid-size businesses who do not have expensive and comprehensive security measures that large enterprises often do. Even if you think you won’t be the next target of a data breach or hack, it’s so crucial to keep your systems and cardholder data protected in order to keep your business running smoothly.

PCI Compliance costs vary depending on your business type, size, environment, etc. The charges cover the cost of maintaining compliance, security audit costs, and fines for breaches and other non-compliance issues. Non-compliance can lead to you being financially responsible for any resulting fraud loss or being charged with costly compliance fees. The purpose of PCI non-compliance fees is to encourage businesses to ensure PCI compliance, and the fees can range anywhere from $10 to $30 a month. But some non-compliance fees can go as high as $100 a month for processors interested in leveraging the fee for excessive profits. That’s why businesses of all sizes should be concerned with ensuring PCI compliance. It not only saves you from having to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, but it also saves you a lot of time that could be spent on more important things.

Attackers are increasingly focusing on small and mid-size businesses who do not have expensive and comprehensive security measures that large enterprises often do.”“

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How Can I Protect Myself With PCI Compliance?

In order for your business to follow standard PCI compliance rules and regulations, it’s important to meet a set of compliance requirements. The first is maintaining and securing your network and having a firewall in place to protect cardholder data. It’s also important to keep your passwords protected and private at all times to prevent someone from gaining authorization to your sensitive data.

Companies that automatically store cardholder data are at an increased risk of a data breach. That’s why we ensure that all of your stored data stays protected through security measures like data encryption, authentication, password protection, and restricted network and server access.

Having an antivirus program that regularly updates and protects against the most recent malware is another essential step to reaching PCI compliance and lowering your security risk. We proactively monitor and maintain your network to make sure your antivirus is regularly updated and doing its job efficiently. We also implement strong access control measures like restricting cardholder data access to a business need-to-know basis.

When it comes to helping your business reach and maintain PCI compliance, we’ll take care of all the fine details and changing regulations for you. That way you can return complete focus back to running your business. We’ll manage your entire IT security infrastructure – from securing your network from predatory intruders to monitoring numerous security events worldwide to keep you up-to-date on all the latest security trends.

FACT: PCI Compliance is now a requirement. If you’re caught with your PCI breeches down (I couldn’t resist just one last pun), you face potentially devastating penalties, which can approach a quarter of a million dollars per event.– www.maitredpos.com

Cognoscape LLC16479 Dal las Parkway, #230Addison, TX 75001(214) 377-4884cognoscape.com