Given all the cyber attacks of late the security of credit card information is more critical than ever, and with a greater use cloud computing the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council recently issued Cloud Computing Guidelines.

PCI initially established its Data Security Standards (DSS) which among other things “provides an actionable framework for developing a robust payment card data security process — including prevention, detection and appropriate reaction to security incidents.” PCI DSS is not law, but rather a group of IT standards created in 2006 by “the five founding global payment brands — American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa.” PCI “enforcement of compliance with the PCI DSS and determination of any non-compliance penalties are carried out by the individual payment brands.”

However now that more cloud service providers (CSP) take payment card payments, the PCI concluded that it was time to create its Cloud Computing Guidelines which established around four different cloud models – private, community, public, and hybrid. Some of the PCI DSS challenges in the cloud include following issues:

  • Clients may have little or no visibility into the CSP’s underlying infrastructure and the related security controls.
  • Clients may have limited or no oversight or control over cardholder data storage. Organizations might not know where cardholder data is physically stored, or the location(s) can regularly change. For redundancy or high availability reasons, data could be stored in multiple locations at any given time.
  • It can be challenging to verify who has access to cardholder data processed, transmitted, or stored in the cloud environment.
  • Many large providers might not support right-to-audit for their clients.

Assuming cyber attacks it is all the more important that cloud providers adhere to the new PCI DSS standards.
 

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