Google Cloud Platform gets PCI DSS certified
- 03 December, 2014 12:21
Google’s Google Cloud Platform has gained a key payments card industry certification that will make it more straightforward for developers to store and process credit card data in its cloud.
One of the security standards that businesses spend time trying to meet is the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS), which outlines measures — such as penetration testing, authentication and systems to monitor malware — that businesses should be taking to protect card data from hackers and thieves.
Amazon Web Services was first validated for compliance with it PCI-DSS version 2.0 back in 2010, and now has about a dozen services validated against version 3.0, which came into effect on January 1, 2014. Azure was validated in January last year. Now Google Cloud Platform joins its rivals, making it easier for developers to begin processing card-holder information in its cloud.
“PCI DSS provides a comprehensive and robust security framework for securing credit card information and transactions. Google is using these third-party audited standards to deliver a platform on which application developers can create and operate their own secure and compliant solutions,” Google Cloud Platform product manager Matthew O’Connor announced today.
In other words, developers who process customers’ credit card information in Google’s cloud will still need to have a had their own systems audited for compliance with the standard.
One customer that has already gone through a PCI-DSS audit is WePay, a payments startup that helps crowdfunding sites and e-commerce vendors accept payments and takes the hassle out of fraud-prone processes like card charge backs.
In a separate announcement, WePay said it was traditionally limited to using hosting providers with dedicated servers but off the back of Google’s newly compliant product, it had moved all of its hosting to Google, allowing it to spin up new servers on the spot as opposed to the process taking several days.
“Moving our hosting entirely into the cloud is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. It will enable us to add more servers in seconds to deal with spikes in demand and give us more flexibility to do systems maintenance without impacting our customers,” David Nye, WePay’s Director of DevOps and IT said.
“But as a payments facilitator, we protect our customers by complying with the highest level of the PCI DSS, and that has made the move into the cloud more complicated than it is for many tech firms who don’t deal directly with payment infrastructure. Our strict adherence to PCI DSS standards has traditionally limited us to PCI compliant hosting providers with dedicated servers.”
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