Does Business Need PCI DSS Readiness Assessment?

Understanding the need of PCI DSS in your industry is the first step towards securing your business. The amount of risk is tremendous without it. Not too long ago, massive retail chain Target revealed that credit and debit card information of 40 million customers had been compromised in a cyber-attack. Such an attack can have disastrous impacts on the business of a huge brand like Target – let along imagine the consequences to deal with in a smaller company.

Before you even look at analysing if your business needs PCI DSS, you need to know what a standard like this does to your business. In the simplest form –

1. It builds and maintains a secure network
2. Keeps all the cardholder data and information safe
3. Prepares strong access control measures all the time
4. Analyse and review a vulnerability management program
5. Test the networks regularly
6. Maintain a policy towards information security.

Pre-analysis of your compliance

Now, to have this implemented, you first need to schedule an official PCI audit which would validate your company’s compliance. This is called a PCI DSS gap assessment and will uncover any security issues that may be present. Apart from this, a self-assessment questionnaire would deeply help understand if such a system would be feasible for your business too. To do this, you need to

1. Review your existing infrastructure right from the network to the access control.
2. Understand where your cardholder data is stored, processed or transmitted in your system.
3. Create a baseline scope or present status for the PCI compliance.
4. Identify the difference between the scope and the requirements

Many businesses miss out the key benefits of having such a certification. One of our clients (newly formed small-business), wanted to look at having PCI DSS gap assessment done for their business. Of course, they had compliance issues and up-scaling their present infrastructure would cost them a lot of money.

As per recommendations, a  PCI DSS Gap Assessment  was done which saved them the entire upgrade – plus implementing the changes on this gap assessment, we were able to change many controls which not only simplified their annual assessment but also reduced the costs that were attached to it.

A simple assessment can go a long way in not only creating a better structure within your business, maintaining quality but also in saving you or your client a lot of money. Moreover, being compliant gives you a huge advantage over other competitors too as well as gives your clientele a lot of confidence in your services. If you are looking for an assessment of this kind, reach out to us and we’d be happy to help.