PCI DSS Compliance and Different Levels for Businesses
Meant to control the payment card industry’s (PCI) security standards, the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) is a set of standards used to authenticate the security of the processing, storing, and transmitting of card information. With this, you can ensure the account security of the entire transaction process. Whether you are a merchant or enterprise, a credit card processor, an acquiring bank, a card payment processing network, a financial institution, etc., it is critical that your business be PCI compliant.
Why Should Your Business Have PCI DSS Compliance?
When PCI DSS compliance is imperative for a business that processes card transactions to protect sensitive information, the Security Standards Council (SSC) of the PCI, which governs the PCI compliance, has no legal right to force the compliance. Nevertheless, by having it, you survive by maintaining and trusting relationships with your clients.
The threat of a security breach is for any business, irrespective of its size. It does not matter whether you are running a small business or have a small number of card transactions. Where you have a poor defence, it causes a breach of security or theft of data, which leads to the loss of confidence and thrust by customers as well as business. It is therefore imperative that you safeguard your payment systems and protect your customers’ debit and credit card information, as well as the transaction channels, in a reliable and cost-effective way.
With a PCI DSS compliance certification, you can meet your compliance goals through a sustainable compliance programme, which includes elaborate documentation, planning, using appropriate tools, and monitoring to avoid the breach.
Get to Know Different PCI DSS Compliance Levels
Businesses process a large number of card transactions every year. Depending on the number of transactions, a company needs to have a specific PCI compliance policy. For this purpose, the PCI DSS compliance levels are classified into four, and they are the following:
Level 1: If your business processes over six million card transactions annually, then this level applies to you. Your PCI compliance should undergo an internal audit held by the PCI auditor once a year. Other than this, you also need to lodge a PCI scan through an approved scanning vendor (ASV).
Level 2: Where you process between 1-6 million card transactions every year, you are required to fill out a self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) and send it every year, as well as a PCI scan every quarter.
Level 3: This level is for those businesses that process between twenty thousand and one million transactions, especially e-commerce, annually. Other than submitting the completed and relevant SAQ, they should also send a PCI scan every quarter.
Level 4: Where the card transactions are fewer than 20,000, such businesses need to submit an annual assessment by filling out the relevant SAQ as well as the quarterly PCI scan.
The PCI DSS compliance for the above levels depends on the security compliance requirements, which keep changing due to periodic updating.