PCI Compliance – Everything You Need to Know

Carrying cash along with you every time seems like an age before talk. With the advent of credit cards and then debit cards the carrying of cash has been disappeared. The payment Card industry has boomed in no time due to its ease of access and convenience. The PCI refers to all the credit cards, debit and ATM cards, prepaid cards, e-wallets and POS. All the organizations working in the area of storage processing and transmitting the cardholders data and facilitate the use of payment cards through various tools and processes come under the umbrella name of Payment Card Industry. Some of the major Card Brands are American Express, MasterCard Worldwide, Union Pay, Visa International and many more.

The Payment Card Industry deals with a millions of users day to day and it becomes necessary to hold all the process in network and data secured form. Payment Card Industry Compliance addresses to the same issues. It gives the required security standards to be adhered to while being in this business. Payments Card Industry Security Standards Council is responsible for developing the security standards which are followed throughout the industry be it any small or big organization. For the achievement of PCI Compliance, two basic steps are necessary to follow. These are:

•         A secure connection between the customer’s browser and the web server.
•          Validation that the website operators are a legitimate, legally accountable organization.

Any business in the Payment Card Industry requires PCI Compliance. Violation of this Compliance results in serious penalty as PCI deals with important sensitive information of the Card Holder as Full Permanent Account number, name of the card holder, service code, validation date of the card, card verification value, the full magnetic strip data, PIN and PIN blocks etc.

Therefore, A PCI compliant hosting provider should provide multiple layers of defense and a secure data protection model that combines physical and virtual security methods. Virtual security includes authorization, authentication, passwords, etc. Physical includes restricted access and server, storage and networking cabinet locks. NeelPro System offers innovative solutions for the business keeping in mind the security standards as the main focus along with creativity.

Assessments examine the compliance of merchants and services providers with the PCI DSS at a specific point in time .They frequently utilize a sampling methodology to allow compliance to be demonstrated through representative systems and processes. It is the responsibility of the merchant and service provider to achieve, demonstrate, and maintain their compliance at all times both throughout the annual assessment cycle and across all systems and processes in their entirety.

It is necessary to adhere to PCI Compliance because many times it has been observed that often the reason of the breaches in the security is due to that one slight violation of the PCI Compliance norms and standards that the organizations overlook to save a little extra effort.