These are a few of my favorite things
December 20, 2011 | 1 Comments | Encryption, PCI Compliance, Tokenization
By Beth McGarrity
As the year comes to a close, and TV personalities from Oprah to Ellen to Barbara Walters highlight their favorite things and most fascinating stories in 2011, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on my favorite SecurityCents posts and industry news and share them with you.
PCI Announces Guidance for Merchants.
Merchants were provided with an abundance of guidance this year on emerging technologies that assist with compliance and securing sensitive data. The first documents were released in late 2010 and focused on point-to-point encryption followed by tokenization and virtualization. In the New Year, the Council will focus on three new areas including cloud, risk assessment and e-commerce security.
Validation from Coalfire Systems.
It’s easy for vendors to say that their product or solution is going to help merchants reduce the scope of PCI compliance. In some cases, it’s really just unsubstantiated marketing hype. At Merchant Link, we invest significantly in R&D to ensure that our solutions really do reduce PCI scope and we wanted to offer our customers a third-party validation of this fact. Coalfire evaluated our TransactionVault™ and TransactionShield™ solutions for tokenization and encryption and confirmed our findings.
Avivah Litan Talks Tokenization.
We had the honor of featuring Avivah Litan on a podcast recently to discuss payment security. As a renowned expert in this area, Avivah regularly publishes industry research and opinions on her own blog that we avidly follow here at Merchant Link. For this podcast, Avivah focused on key trends in payment security, specifically as it relates to point-to-point encryption and tokenization.
Google Wallet Meets MasterCard and NFC.
Its here! Finally…well…sort of. The technology for mobile wallets has been around for awhile, but the concept hasn’t caught on very well. Then Google entered the market with the mobile wallet, using Near Field Communications (NFC) to allow for data exchange with point-of-sale (POS) technologies. From the payment side, the company partnered with MasterCard and Citi to allow users to pair credit cards to their phones. It’s been an interesting progression to watch and something we will certainly keep an eye out for as the issues surrounding secure payment transactions will be top of mind for merchants.
What else is on your list of favorite things from 2011? Share them with us by posting a comment below.