What is PCI Compliance?

PCI Compliance is the standard required by the Payment Card Industry of businesses wishing to accept credit card payments. It is not currently legislation but the standards are being enforced by a number of banks worldwide with compliancy failure being punished by either fines or restrictions of service.

PCI compliancy aims to prove the trader's commitment to cardholder security by verifying both the security of their ecommerce website and their in office business practices. In theory this is quite straight forward. In practice however this can be quite tricky.

The PCI compliancy standard is actually the same across the board, which means that an SME with 6 employees sharing an office based in the Managing Director's private residence, selling products via a single ecommerce solution managed from three PC's, must have the same level of security as a multi-national organisation that has headquarters in three different countries, a thousand employees and a network spanning the globe, selling products via direct websites, reseller sites and call centres.

However, don't panic just yet. Various organisations have risen to the challenge of assisting you in attaining your compliance. Advansys have added this string to their bow, working with a trusted scanning agency to ensure that our ecommerce solutions are completely watertight (and that they stay that way) and also taking the time to go through the business practices required by the Payment Card Industry so that our clients will always be on top of their game at review time.