July 24, 2017 • Published by Marc Punzirudu
Encryption • Firewalls • Malware
The ability to devalue credit card data has made point-to-point encryption (P2PE) technology a hot topic among franchisors. And what’s not to love? With a PCI P2PE solution in place, your franchise can check off that PCI compliance box as well as rest assured that your payment transactions are safe and secure.
But is securing your credit card transactions between the POS and the payment processor all your business should worry about? Does implementing P2PE make every other security technology irrelevant to your business?
Imagine that one or more of your stores is hit with ransomware or a malware attack and suddenly, these stores are unable to ring customers up. Now imagine that the cyber attack puts a hold on your business for days, or even weeks, and you can’t conduct inventory, do payroll, etc., etc.
Your organization hemorrhages money for every minute this type of scenario goes on. There’s simply no way your employees can do the same amount of work, as quickly and as accurately, when their processes suddenly became manual.
I’m very familiar with “We sell burgers and beers, not firewalls,” but if you want to focus on burger and beer sales, and not on technology downtime and revenue loss, then you’d better make sure you have a properly configured and well maintained firewall in place.
Firewalls are a business necessity and as such, they remain a critical security requirement regardless of P2PE usage. That’s because firewalls have a very important job, which is to prevent Internet-based attacks and unauthorized access that can take down your business network.
P2PE solutions may assist with your PCI compliance and securing cardholder data, but the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) is not aimed at protecting your operations. Add a firewall to P2PE, and now you have protection of both cardholder data and your overall business.
Why put out fires when you can prevent most of them from happening in the first place? As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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