Can you hold Payment Card Information (PCI) data in a cloud-based service? Yes, but doing so isn't straightforward, so the PCI Security Standards Council has published a guideline that clarifies what approaches compliance-minded businesses can take.
A new set of guidelines from the PCI Security Standards Council is intended to help merchants and cloud services providers comply with the PCI DSS when handling payment card data on the web.
Businesses are in the crosshairs as military and spy organizations around the world step up their cyber-snooping techniques, and the shift to cloud is only exacerbating the risks. How can you be sure your cloud partner is capable of protecting your data from cyberattacks?
If you're wondering exactly what is PCI compliance, the chances are you're one of the many business owners in Australia who've asked themselves this same question. Before answering this question, it's useful to begin by looking at what PCI (and its counterpart DSS) stands for.
As we noted in last year's CSO article, "Six ways we gave up our privacy," people are increasingly -- and willingly -- throwing their privacy to the wind, thanks to an addiction to Google apps, GPS devices, the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some security experts believe privacy is dead already.
To use Cloud computing securely requires companies to know where their data is stored and who has access to
it. Ironically, the reason Cloud is so popular is because organisations don't want to worry about these details.
So can the issue be solved by adhering to standards? Increasing legislation? Maybe we need a global technical
disaster to ‘sober up’ an industry drunk on the power of Moore's Law.
Companies and retailers that process credit and debit cards are required to implement the requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This ebook looks at why many now feel that this standard should also be implemented by companies that are not required to do so due to its many benefits.