Cybersecurity Solutions

There were 1,579 data breaches with over 178 million records exposed in 2017 alone. That averages about four data breaches a day for the entire year of 2017. Let that sink in for a second. That amounts to a nearly 45% overall increase over 2016 figures. Thankfully, there are ways that you can avoid a data breach, but these figures still lend themselves to have a bit of sticker shock. One way that companies can protect themselves from payment card data breaches is protecting their cardholder data environment (CDE) via PCI (Payment Card Industry) DSS (Data Security Standard) compliance. Any organization or merchant that accepts, transmits or stores any cardholder data must comply with PCI DSS.

Merchants need to protect the cardholder data that they collect and encryption is one of the ways this is accomplished. Encryption by itself is not enough to place data out of scope for PCI DSS. This blog will cover what a cardholder data environment is, how encrypted data is part of that environment, and how encryption fits into the scope of PCI compliance.