Achieving and maintaining Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliance is a must for any organization that interacts in any way with payment cardholder data. PCI DSS compliance can be challenging. PK Protect is the best choice in securing cardholder data, providing sensitive data discovery and management for both achieving and sustaining compliance.
Download this solution overview to learn more about how PK Protect works to protect cardholder data for PCI DSS compliance.
Which PCI DSS Requirements This Addresses
Compliance is not one obligation but several, and PK Protect maps onto four of them directly.
Requirement 3 covers protecting stored cardholder data. Requirement 4 covers encrypting cardholder data in transit across open, public networks. Requirement 7 covers restricting access by business need-to-know. Requirement 12 covers maintaining an information security policy that reaches employees and contractors alike.
Assess: Find the Cardholder Data First
Scope is decided by where the data actually is, not by where it is supposed to be. Discovery runs across file systems, databases, cloud repositories and endpoints, on structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, and on every major platform from on-premises to cloud.
Two findings matter more than the rest. Cardholder data located outside the cardholder data environment is flagged, with remediation applied automatically according to policy. PINs and card verification values held beyond their permitted retention window are identified in the same pass, which is a violation that rarely surfaces until an assessor looks for it.
Machine learning does the work of separating real card data from things that resemble it, so both false positives and false negatives fall as formats vary by application and by region.
Remediate: Encryption and Masking Do Different Jobs
Encryption is reversible protection for data that authorized systems still need to read. The options run from file and email encryption to element-level, format-preserving and transparent database encryption, applied on demand or in real time according to policy, with every operation audited centrally.
Masking is the opposite. It removes the sensitive values while preserving the shape and usefulness of the record, and there is no linkage between the masked copy and the original, so nothing can be reversed. That is what makes it the right choice for development, test and analysis, where teams need production-quality data and no legitimate need for real card numbers.
Applied to files and emails, the same techniques remove card numbers permanently while leaving the rest of the content untouched.
Restrict Access at the Boundary
Requirement 7 is a question about roles rather than systems. Policy designates who may reach cardholder data, and the boundary of the cardholder data environment is enforced against that designation.
The part organizations underestimate is third parties. Technology partners, supply chain participants, resellers and data processors all hold roles that need the same treatment as internal ones, and each is a route into scope if it is not governed.
Report: Continuous Rather Than Annual
Automated alerts fire whenever PCI data is discovered, rather than at the next assessment. Mapping and scoping of the cardholder data environment stay current, and remediation of data found outside it is recorded as it happens.
That continuity is the difference between achieving compliance and maintaining it. Scope grows quietly between audits, through a new report, a partner extract or a test environment refreshed from production, and a control that only runs before an assessment will not find any of it.
Built for Where PCI DSS Is Going
The objectives behind PCI DSS 4.0 are explicit: keep the standard aligned with the security needs of the payments industry, add flexibility and support additional methods of achieving security, promote security as a continuous process, and improve validation methods and procedures.
The third of those is the one that changes programs. A standard that treats security as continuous rewards controls that run continuously, which is the same reason scope reduction and automated discovery pay back more each year rather than once.