PCI DSS Compliance
PCI DSS compliance is one of the most stringent and most coveted security standard in the industry today. With 6 goals, 12 requirements and over 300 sub-requirements, for the cardholder data environment, PCI compliance helps businesses to reduce and minimize the risk of their payment systems from getting breached and theft of cardholder data.
It is applicable to any organization that accepts, stores, processes and/or transmits cardholder data. Whether you are a merchant, acquirer bank, credit card processor, payment card brand (such as Mastercard, VISA, JCB, American Express, Discover, Rupay, UnionPay, etc.) debit, credit or ATM cards issuer, financial institution, Independent Sales Organization (ISO), or an agent, PCI Compliance will be crucial for your business.
Why it is required?
While PCI DSS compliance is a required standard for any company that accepts, stores, processes and/or transmits cardholder data, yet there are certain differences in the requirements for each company based on its annual number of payment transactions which involves the cardholders physical card or card data. Depending on your business size and annual payment transactions, SISA can help you secure your business in the best possible manner.
The threat of cyber-attacks does not depend on the size of business but how easy it is to get into the systems. Just because it’s a small business and performs low numbers of card transactions, if your defenses are low, you may experience a breach that may result in the loss of customers’ trust and brand goodwill. You may even run the risk of going out of business. Therefore, you must secure your payment systems in a cost-effective yet reliable way to defend your transaction channels and your customers card data.
For large enterprises, there will be more specific compliance goals and a complex IT infrastructure. The enterprise will be required to implement PCI compliance, not as a one-time activity, but to create a sustainable compliance security program that involves detailed documentation, right tools, continuous planning and monitoring to secure and minimizing the breach.
No matter what size your organization is and what your compliance needs are, SISA has the right solution for you.
PCI Compliance Journey and Stages
Pre-Assessment and Assessment Phase:
Both SISA and the client initiate the project with a kick-off call, introducing respective project teams and laying down the process for the PCI compliance.
The journey starts with a one-hour awareness session on PCI DSS for the PCI stakeholders, to be identified by the client. As PCI spans across the entity, the stakeholders would be the IT team, information security team, operations team, business team, and the top management. This sets the tone for the PCI compliance journey as the stage involves interaction with various stakeholders.
SISA requests for documents and business flowcharts necessary to understand the cardholder data flow in the environment and initiates scoping the environment for PCI DSS requirements applicability.
After completion of scoping exercise SISA conducts Gap Assessment with the help of PCI Risk Assessment with the objective of identifying all the risks, pertaining to the scoped environment and share the detailed action tracker, which lists down all the action points to be mitigated by the client.
Remediation Phase:
After the completion of Pre-Assessment and Assessment phases, the client receives an action tracker list from QSA, which the client must remediate/mitigate the gaps found in the cardholder data environment during the gap assessment.
SISA assists the client with offsite consulting support for the closure of the gaps in order to achieve PCI DSS Certification.
Onsite Audit and PCI DSS Certification:
This is the final phase of the PCI DSS Certification project. Once the client shares all the evidence and confirms the closure of the gaps, the QSA performs an offsite review for satisfied controls and closures followed by an onsite visit for the final certification.
Once found compliant, the client gets certification as the PCI DSS compliant.
How SISA will help you to get PCI compliant?
As an industry leader in payments security space, SISA can help you understand your requirements, assess your current state of compliance, identify gaps and threats, and supports you to remediate the gaps and risks in order to achieve the PCI Compliance.
With over a decade of experience in the payment security space, SISA brings a rare depth of understanding and acts as a trusted partner to over 2000 customers in 40+ countries to secure their network and technology infrastructure in order to secure the cardholder data.
SISA has worked to provide cutting-edge compliance services to a diverse industries and domains which includes banks, ITES, insurance, e-commerce, payment service providers, telecommunications, airlines and retail companies.
How to maintain PCI DSS Compliance?
While achieving compliance is a good first step, maintaining compliance by adhering to processes and standards at all times is absolutely critical. Below are some of the task that needs to be performed on a quarterly or half-yearly basis in order to maintain the PCI certification:
- Perform ASV
- Perform Penetration Testing
- Run data discovery tool to discover card data in plain text
- Train the professionals
Want your business to be PCI Compliant? Talk to SISA’s team of experts on PCI DSS.