With penalties running as high as $180 million, the incentives to keep your company secure with the latest changes in payment compliance is clear. If you’re not aiming to have a protected PCI system in place, you could be putting your business at risk. The existential threat to your business is very real when it comes to cyberattacks, so be sure to take these issues seriously.
Here’s everything you need to know about PCI DSS compliance and why it matters to you and your customers.
What Is PCI Compliance?
PCI compliance is a written standard for the credit card industry. The major card brands created it, while the third-party PCI Security Standards Council maintains and upholds it.
PCI Data Security Standard has many technical requirements to protect and secure payment data. It’s meant to manage this information during the processing, handling, storage, and transmission of card purchases.
All businesses handling card data need to comply with the PCI requirements. If they don’t, they could face major fines or lose their ability to accept these forms of payment.
Your Business Data Will Be Secure
Protecting the data of your company and your employees is vital to keeping your business going. Tracking the security aspects of this data is as important as keeping the perimeter of your building secure. You should be dedicating lots of time to securing your digital information.
There are stories about malware threats taking down major companies in the news regularly. With these kinds of attacks and remote-access threats becoming prevalent, you need to make sure that your computers, servers, and networks are secure.
The reason that PCI DSS exists is to ensure that hackers and thieves can’t get any access to your data. If you follow the standards they’ve laid out, you’ll avoid any expensive data breaches and keep your customers and employees protected.
Keep Customers Confident
When a customer hears that a major company has suffered a breach, it lowers their confidence in the business. They’re far less likely to want to do business with them than a company that hasn’t had this happen to them. If you knew that business was going to lose your credit card information, you’d avoid them like the plague.
Customer confidence will show up in your fiscal year reports. It can impact how profitable you are. When confidence drops, you’ll see your profits drop as well.
More than 50% of consumers won’t shop at a business that is suffering from data issues. While they may return later, they are available to competitors in the interim. If you get breached, or people lose confidence, it’s going to be hard to get them back.
PCI compliance helps ensure that your customers know that you take security seriously. If you’re not taking precautions to keep their payment data safe, that lack of peace of mind will drive them into the arms of the other businesses in your industry.
Avoid Fines and Lawsuits
If you get breached, not only do you lose customers and have to potentially reimburse people, but you also lose tons of data. That’s a hard fall to recover from. To compound the pain, you’ll then have fines and lawsuits from both your customers and other organizations to deal with.
When a major company gets breached, the Federal Trade Commission could sue. If you think you’re secure and say so without enough evidence, the FTC can come after you for false statements following your breach. No matter how well your company is doing, these types of suits can take down a business permanently.
If you get saddled with customer lawsuits, third-party suits, government fines, or class action suits, the news could get ahold of the story. Being PCI compliant is the only way to avoid this. The liability that your company might incur isn’t worth it.
You Can Reduce Data Breach Costs
With the cost of an average data breach now close to $4 million, there’s not a business model in the world built to take that hit. The cost of replacing credit cards, paying for fines, and compensating your customers is massive. If you aren’t PCI compliant, you could face these charges.
Breaches at major companies end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of not being secure far outweighs the cost of maintaining security.
A data breach can easily shut down a company. While major corporations can handle those kinds of hits, not every brand has capital behind them to support these issues. Most businesses aren’t as lucky as companies like Target, who had a major breach but didn’t close a single store over it.
Staying compliant with PCI DSS requires you to be diligent. If you take your company into the territory of PCI DSS and serverless systems, you need to do your research. With the right research and lots of documentation proving your compliance, your efforts will protect your brand.
When you have proof to back up your compliance, you can avoid lots of the fines that follow a breach.
Protected PCI Saves Companies
If you’re investing in systems that drive you into protected PCI territory, you’re also protecting your assets. Your company and customer data are important to keep your brand afloat and when you protect them, you send a strong message to customers. You let them know that you want them to be comfortable working with you, even when other brands aren’t compliant.
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