Is Your Company Website PCI Compliant?

Ensuring that your eCommerce site is PCI Compliant is a massively important aspect of maintaining a usable online retail business. Unfortunately, it is a complicated area which many businesses, particularly start-ups or businesses new to eCommerce, struggle with, in the vital early days of their business attempting to establish a presence on the internet.

What Is PCI Compliancy?

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, and a PCI Compliant website needs to adhere to a specific set of security standards, which were developed as a means of protecting card information during and after an eCommerce transaction. PCI compliancy is now required by all brands of credit and debit cards.

The Six Main Requirements Of PCI Compliancy

In order for a website to be fully PCI Compliant, it needs to:

1. Build, And Ensure The Maintenance Of, A Secure Network – By installing and maintaining a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data, and using unique, non-vendor supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters, this is a relatively easy step for a business to complete.

2. Protect All Cardholder Data, Past And Present – Ensuring that cardholder data is secure, both those of current and previous transactions, and encrypting the transmission of card holder data across any open, public networks, an eCommerce business can massively improve the security of its site.

3. Maintain A Vulnerability Management Program – By keeping your essential anti-virus software updated, along with developing, and then maintaining, completely secure systems and applications you are massively improving your eCommerce solution's security and bring your site ever closer to PCI Compliancy.

4. Implement Strong Access Control Measures – Obviously, you don't want just anyone accessing your business' and your customer's private data; restricting access to cardholder data to everyone but the 'need-to-know' operatives and assigning a unique ID to every person with computer access within your eCommerce solution, you can massively decrease the chances of undesired access to valuable information.

Also, by restricting physical access to cardholder's data, and only printing the absolutely necessary aspects of a customer's important information, you are making your customer's information ever more secure.

5. Regularly Monitor And Test Its Networks – Constantly track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data to ensure no unwarranted access and regularly test your security systems and process, to do your best to ensure that there cannot be any unwarranted access.

6. Maintain A Policy Which Dictates Strong Information Security – Be certain that your business has a policy which addresses information security; you need to keep any information your customer offers you as private as possible.

Ensure That Your Business Is PCI Compliant!

Whilst these are the ways to ensure complete PCI Compliancy, looking at PCI DSS (PCI Data Security Standards) as just another checklist is a terrible idea. You need to ensure that your customer's information is not going to be accessed by any undesirable persons, that it remains private and secure and that the trust your customers place in your business is completely justified.

For more information, or to ensure that your company boasts a completely secure, PCI Compliant eCommerce solution, visit us at Advansys. With many years in providing incredible eCommerce solutions and PCI Compliant website designs to a wide range of industries, we are experts in making your website safe, secure and completely user-friendly.

Call Advansys on 0845 838 2700, email us at sales@advansys.com or check out our website today!

We’re always happy to help and can help you take your business in the right direction.

You are always welcome to visit us in our Wokingham office or you can also call us on 0118 380 0201 and drop us a message via our the website.

We'd love to show you how you can get more web traffic and leads, increase your online sales, provide better customer service & grow online.

Call us

0118 380 0201

Find us

4 Millars Brook

Molly Millars Lane

Wokingham

Berkshire

RG41 2AD

United Kingdom

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