Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is not easy to achieve. Quite the opposite, in fact: A 2017 Verizon report stated that 80 percent of companies fail their PCI DSS assessments, and only 29 percent of those that pass are still compliant after one year. PCI DSS compliance, like information security as a whole, is not a one-and-done process but ongoing. To succeed, your enterprise must be vigilant.

While every merchant and service provider that processes, stores, or transmits credit card data must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), not all must travel the same path to PCI compliance. The amount of risk an organization faces depends on a variety of factors. Recognizing these differences, the PCI Security Standards Council developed four compliance levels for merchants and two for service providers.

A PCI audit examines the security of your organization’s credit-card processing system from beginning to end. During this process, a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) or your own Internal Security Assessor will determine the effectiveness of your organization’s information security controls.

Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and its 281 directives can be a time-consuming hassle. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize your PCI DSS scope, saving time and resources for your organization and auditor, and ratcheting down your stress levels. Larger organizations—those processing more than 1 million credit-card transactions annually—may need two years to reach initial PCI DSS compliance.

PCI DSS, or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, is the set of regulatory requirements all organizations who process card payments must adhere to. Sounds simple enough, right? But PCI compliance can pose a major challenge to organizations if they’re not equipped with the proper knowledge and tools.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) program provides an information security compliance benchmark for companies that are handling, processing and storing cardholder data online. Software development and vulnerability management are covered in the PCI DSS compliance requirements as this concerns products and applications created to handle cardholder data.

Today we are very excited to announce our latest release — Sysdig Secure 2.3! In this version of Sysdig Secure, we have invested heavily in hardening the compliance posture of Kubernetes, Docker configurations, and container images. We have released a set of features that provide compliance focused image scanning, guided remediation, compliance dashboards, and more.

PCI DSS is an incredibly important compliance standard for those processing card payments. It stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Whilst that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it is a very resilient set of standard requirements that aims to make a business more secure. A 2018 payment security report revealed that no company affected by a data breach was completely compliant with PCI DSS.

Despite the fact that PCI DSS has been in effect for over a decade, and most merchants are achieving compliance, some of the world’s largest retailers have been hit by to data breaches. The sad truth is that achieving compliance doesn’t guarantee data protection, even for large organizations. For example, more than five million credit card numbers were stolen in 2018 hacks of two major retailers.