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Do you know how long it takes to become PCI compliant?
Fulfilling all the requirements spelled out in the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a complicated process with a ton of moving pieces.
Depending on how much of the PCI process your business does by itself, without any third-party assistance, the process can take at least six months – even extending as long as an entire year.
Fortunately, with an end-to-end data security approach that protects all of a business’ cardholder data, getting PCI compliance-ready is attainable in as little as 7 business days.
By streamlining your information security and compliance efforts to reach PCI compliance quickly, you can channel your organization’s time and massive cost savings toward what matters: Growing your business.
Now, before we get into the 7-day PCI compliance approach, let’s look at what PCI DSS is and why the old-fashioned approach takes so long.
PCI compliance certification explained
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements that businesses must comply with if they collect, store or transfer PCI data – also known as debit and credit card data.
The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), which is made up of MasterCard, Discover, JCB International, Visa and American Express, designed the PCI DSS to help prevent credit card fraud and protect the data privacy of consumers everywhere.
Businesses become PCI compliant organizations when they verifiably secure their cardholder data - such as credit card numbers and other personal information - in a manner that fulfills all of the requirements described by the payment card industry’s security standards.
What level of PCI compliance your business requires is generally reliant on the number of card transactions you process annually. If you process a high volume of card transactions (2 million to 6 million depending on the card issuer), your business will require Level 1 compliance, with lower volumes of transactions covered by Level 2-4 certification.
Regardless of what level of compliance you require, PCI requirements are mandatory for any business that handles PCI data.
Non-compliance can result in financial penalties and many other unintended, costly consequences, such as a data breach.
Your approach to becoming PCI compliant matters
Becoming PCI compliant takes time – but how much, exactly?
The answer: it depends.
After hiring the right compliance requirements experts, doing everything yourself will take you the longest amount of time and cost the most.
Taking advantage of single-use third-party solutions for pieces of the process will cut that time down a bit, but it still isn’t the fastest route and comes with high costs.
Leveraging an end-to-end payment card and information security and compliance solution, like VGS, can get your business to full PCI compliance readiness in less than 7 business days and a fraction of the cost.
You can think of the timeframe for achieving PCI compliance as a spectrum, from longest to shortest:
- DIY - 6-12+ months
- Point solutions - 6+ months
- End-to-end solutions - ~1 Week
Let’s walk through each of these.
The DIY PCI compliance route
When a business opts to go it alone, becoming PCI compliant can take up to a year without any third-party assistance.
Why?
Well, the 12 compliance requirements contained in the PCI DSS all involve significant work. You will likely need to bring on new team members with card data security and compliance expertise to tackle that work, on top of training your current team members.
In chronological order, your organization’s DIY journey to become PCI compliant will look like this:
- Hiring a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) to perform a Gap Assessment
- Training or hiring, on average, 2-5 engineers to remediate problems found during the Gap Assessment
- Potentially purchase new applications and technology
- Deciding what infrastructure to build your CDE on top of
- Putting in place and testing new business controls
- Gathering documentation
- Hiring an auditor to perform your PCI DSS audit
- Performing ongoing maintenance and revalidation
Some of these individual steps can take 1-3 months, but continuous upkeep never truly ends.
To officially validate your PCI compliance, Level 1 merchants and service providers must have an external QSA evaluate whether or not they are compliant. However, for other compliance levels, businesses can complete their own Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ).
Whether you can validate your compliance with an SAQ or not, you will still need to secure your credit card and other sensitive data while fulfilling all PCI requirements.
Point solutions for information security
The DIY route involves several complicated steps, many of which you likely won’t have all the expertise you’ll need to pull it off.
This means you’ll have to bring on new people and potentially some third-party solutions that can help you get one or more of the PCI process steps completed.
Outsourcing your payment processing or working with a third-party cloud storage provider, to give two examples, can reduce the time and effort you need to dedicate to certain steps in the process.
By only relying on third-party assistance for some pieces of the puzzle, your business is left to shoulder the weight of figuring out the rest of the equation. At the end of the day, this only reduces costs and time spent somewhat because you are still ultimately responsible for the PCI process and compliance.
An end-to-end data security and compliance solution wins hands down as the fastest, most affordable, and least stressful road to PCI DSS compliance.
End-to-end solutions for a lower PCI compliance cost
With an all-in-one approach to PCI compliance using end-to-end data security technology, the journey to becoming fully compliant is decidedly shorter.
An end-to-end solution, like the one from VGS, offers businesses the ability to offload the collection, transfer, and storage of their sensitive data – effectively de-scoping their systems from PCI DSS compliance.
VGS uses data aliasing technology, which redacts and replaces sensitive data in real-time so that you can use PCI data (and other types of sensitive information) without it ever touching your systems.
Offloading data security burden to VGS enables businesses to eliminate the risk of sensitive data breaches and to achieve multiple different types of compliances, including PCI DSS, significantly faster and at a fraction of the cost.
Get PCI ready in as little as 7 business days
By offloading your data security burden to the experts at VGS, you inherit VGS’ robust security posture enabling you to virtually achieve instant compliance for most PCI levels.
By fast-tracking your PCI compliance journey to just 7 days, your business can get this tedious (but necessary) hurdle out of the way.
