Storing Data

PCI compliance means making sure that your data security is in line with the minimal recommended requirements of the payment card industry standards. What this means is that you are looking after the personal and financial information of customers and clients who hand over their payment details and keeping it safe from potential hackers and others who might break into your system.

In order to accept a payment card it is necessary for you to meet this PCI compliance and if you do not then you will only be able to accept cash – drastically decreasing the number of impulse buys you get and making your company seem relatively dated.

There are many PCI requirements that factor into PCI compliance and if you want to use the cards then you need to meet these. One of these factors is to make sure that you have adequate protection for any stored data and this will affect a great number of businesses.
First of all let's look at why you might want to store data in the first place. Essentially by stored data is meant any information that you keep on a database regarding clients, customers or other businesses. This information might be a list of names and addresses only, or it might be something more thorough such as financial information.

The reason you might store financial information is that you can use it for direct debits and for 'profiles' on a website. Many companies will allow a customer to log in and create a profile that contains their financial data so that they can very easily make purchases at the touch of a button. This allows every part of a website to become a point of sale, but it means that all that information has to be stored on the server. On the other hand any business that provides a customer with a loan, a payment scheme, a subscription or a monthly contract is going to want to take money out of their account automatically on an agreed day – and that means storing data.

Alternatively if you provide a company or an individual with a service, then these ex-clients become leads – i.e. parties that you know are interested in your service and that might be more likely to buy in future. By logging these you can then smartly advertise to them all with future products and services. Even though you are only storing addresses in this situation it is very important that you keep these safe as otherwise your customers could get spammed or suffer from identity theft and you would then lose their faith in your company. So valuable is this kind of information that some companies even sell it for a large profit – so make sure you protect it.

There are many ways to protect stored data for data security and they include making sure that any physical data that is printed out is locked away somewhere safe (and that you don't throw it out with the rest of the trash) while online data needs to be protected by the latest internet security services.

Storing data online or offline is highly useful for businesses, but it does provide some potential security risks. To make sure you meet PCI compliance and have adequate data security before you start storing information, follow the links.