One of the most important things for us, when we started building AppScenic, was to be able to keep our customers’ sensitive information and data safe and secure. And that applies to all that has to do with payments too.
Well, that is where the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) comes into play. This is a standard created by the five largest credit card companies to help reduce consumer and bank data breaches.
Now, to help you better understand what PCI DSS compliance actually is and why it is essential for us to have it, we’ve put together this article.
So, read on if you want to know more about why PCI DSS safeguards our business and yours.
More about PCI DSS compliance
How did PCI DSS come to be? Well, in order to prevent further data theft and breaches, which were constantly increasing in the last years, the five largest credit card brands, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, and JCB, created the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
After that, the PCI Security Standards Council was established as an independent body with the mission to monitor threats and improve the ways industries dealt with them. And they were planning to do that by implementing PCI Security Standards and training security professionals.
Now, to have all these security standards in place and be compliant, companies need to follow a complex process with requirements like establishing data security policies for their business and employees or removing card data from their processing system and payment terminals.
Unfortunately, according to a 2018 Verizon Payment Security Report, only 52.5% of all organizations are 100% PCI compliant.
Why is PCI compliance important for a company like us?
Being PCI DSS compliant was extremely important for an ecommerce and dropshipping company like AppScenic. The fact is that any company that accepts payment cards should be following the PCI compliance regulations in order to protect their customers’ sensitive data against breaches.
By having this PCI compliance, we can help defend our business and yours against hackers who can get access to the sensitive cardholders’ data and then use this to impersonate cardholders or try to steal their identity.
How does it actually work? Well, once these payment security standards are in place (which they are), AppScenic can safely and securely accept, store, process, and transmit all our customers’ credit card information during a credit card transaction.
So, PCI DSS compliance should be an essential security step to take for any businesses that store and process their customers’ private credit card information. What’s even more interesting is that this PCI DSS can also help us be compliant with other data security and privacy laws, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
