PCI DSS Compliance

If you operate or plan on operating an ecommerce website through which to conduct your online business, PCI DSS compliance should be looked upon as essential.

Ensuring that your website is hosted on a PCI DSS compliant server is now a more crucial measure than ever before. With online fraud and the threat of website hacking in order to siphon credit card details at an unprecedented high, the security levels and insurance provided by PCI DSS compliance is vital to your business.

What is PCI DSS?

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS is a set of comprehensive requirements designed to secure and protect customer payment account data.

In response to the increasing threat of data theft and the millions of stolen customer card records, the card payment industry was forced to take action. To secure customer data and confidence card payment companies joined forces to create the PCI DSS standard. The standard features 12 requirements that aim to safeguard sensitive card data across the card payment industry.

Why Do I Need PCI DSS?

PCI DSS applies to you if you're involved in storing, processing or transmitting any cardholder data. What's more, the standard doesn't just apply to storing data electronically. It also covers manual processing and storage.

As PCI DSS covers your entire trading environment, all third-party partners that store, process or transmit data must also comply. This means you can only achieve full compliance when your third-party partners comply.

Although not yet a legal requirement, compliance with the PCI DSS standard is highly advised by all card data authorities. Many of the merchant account providers such as Barclaycard must report to the card schemes such as VISA and MasterCard, to inform them of the status of their merchants' compliance with PCI DSS. From these reports, the card schemes then select merchants to investigate. If they find fault with a merchant's compliance, they will levy non-compliance fines.

The risks don't end there. You could also face compromise fines and potentially unlimited fraud costs. That's why merchants should view PCI DSS compliance as an insurance policy, protecting them from the financial costs of failing to secure card data. Furthermore, working towards compliance will help you improve your processes and operate more securely.

What Quantum Can Do For You

Quantum Web Solutions takes its responsibility to provide its clients with the highest possible standard of website hosting extremely seriously. Quantum provides PCI DSS compliant hosting as standard with all of our ecommerce website systems, something that some of our competitors still fail to supply, let alone as standard.

Checking Your Compliance

To ensure that your ecommerce website is in constant compliance to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Quantum offers you the opportunity of a free PCI DSS scan from the world’s foremost leading brand in web security, McAfee Secure.

Find out more about Quantum’s offer of a free PCI DSS scan.