High-profile data breaches that expose customer credit card information keep making headlines, and there’s no end in sight. Recently, video game store GameStop reported a potential security breach that may have exposed customer payment information. Fast food restaurant Arby’s is investigating a data breach that may have compromised credit card data for hundreds of thousands of customer transactions.

Retailers that collect, process, store or transmit their customers’ cardholder information must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), but compliance can be incredibly burdensome for a retail operation. As Liaison Director of Information Security Theresa Robison explained in a March blog post, PCI DSS compliance requires six actions:

• Build and maintain a secure network
• Protect cardholder data
• Maintain a vulnerability management program
• Implement strong access control measures
• Regularly monitor and test networks
• Maintain an information security policy

That is a daunting set of requirements for a retailer to handle, but Liaison customers can rely on our security solutions to ensure compliance. Liaison protects millions of payment card transactions per year and provides industry-leading PCI DSS compliance services for organizations worldwide. With Liaison’s help, customers have successfully passed hundreds of PCI DSS audits, relying on the encryption and tokenization solutions Liaison designs to ensure compliance.

Last year, Liaison strengthened its retailer services portfolio by migrating its Tokenization as a Service (TaaS) solution to the award-winning ALLOY^TM Platform. Deploying TaaS on a powerful big data framework like ALLOY provides Liaison customers with a way to significantly improve security and handle multiple processes much more quickly. In fact, TaaS on ALLOY expedites transactions by more than 80% and improves scalability, allowing retailers to handle bigger workloads without processing delays.

Tokenization is a critical security component because it lets retailers secure customer payment card information by substituting confidential data elements with a unique equivalent that isn’t vulnerable to exploitation. Using TaaS on ALLOY, customers not only enjoy faster speeds during the tokenization process, they can tokenize a wider variety of data types, protecting other forms of sensitive data beyond payment card information — Social Security numbers and Protected Health Information (PHI), for example.

Since Liaison’s TaaS takes an offsite vault storage approach, retailers who use it gain easier access to sensitive customer data without the added risk of onsite storage, plus they enjoy built-in backup and recovery services. These features set Liaison apart from competitors who use traditional “vaultless” databases, which are often plagued by security vulnerabilities. A storage approach like Liaison’s also makes it easier for users to scale up and securely store large amounts of data in a variety of formats.

Choosing between speed, scalability and safety isn’t an option in an environment where hackers get more sophisticated every day. Luckily, retailers don’t have to make that choice. Liaison’s ALLOY Platform provides the big data muscle and PCI DSS compliance solution retailers need to scale up safely. Learn more about how the ALLOY Platform’s comprehensive integration and data management services help retailers securely integrate and manage data here.