Goodbye to DIY PCI, Hello VGS
VGS provided a unique solution in the market. Their proxy solution is ingenious... it provides incredible flexibility.”
- Tony La,
CTO
When Tony started conversations with VGS, he noticed a significant difference from other vendors. In fact, until he and his team started testing, he thought there might be some “magic” happening (i.e., he was a bit skeptical). He marveled, “The VGS proxy solution is ingenious. It’s a solution that keeps our servers clean, and it provides incredible flexibility.”
Zero Data = Zero Liability
The most attractive thing about VGS was the unique Zero Data approach that guarantees PCI compliance by ensuring customer data never touches a client’s servers. This contrasts with the older encryption or tokenization methods used to protect data, by most solutions today. Though both have their strengths for certain use cases, the original data still resides on a client’s servers to some degree in each, leaving systems within the scope of PCI DSS.
VGS solves for this by using data aliasing, a next-gen technology that allows clients to collect, protect and exchange data just as if it was in its raw state, but without the client ever possessing it. Data never touches a client’s servers, taking systems out of PCI DSS scope. This shifts the ongoing compliance burden and liability from Honk.
Full Data Ownership
Though the Honk team never possesses the data, they still own it and retain full control. “One big question was, ‘Hey, what happens if this relationship doesn't work out, and I want my credit card data moved to another place?’ With VGS, you own the data and already have access to it, so you just pull that data out and send it to another location,” Tony said.
Faster, Less Work for Honk
Tony also appreciated the ease of obtaining a Report on Compliance (ROC) by using VGS. Through VGS, obtaining an ROC takes just a couple of weeks, not several months of Honk employees’ time. Tony explained that this is important as they transition from merchant to service provider, “If we were running our own payment infrastructure, it would actually be a relatively large change to go from merchant directly to service provider.”
Developer Focus
VGS’ focus on developer experience allows the team to support several critical scenarios without extra development work. This was a key comparison criteria for the Honk team. They found they were able to integrate VGS into their environment easily, without making any changes to their product architecture. As they expand internationally, VGS also supports easy integration into local payment service providers (PSPs) and enables intelligent routing to the customer's preferred PSP. This means huge potential time savings for the team, since if another vendor’s back-end doesn’t support a certain gateway, they would have to change both the back-end and front-end.
Ease of Use
Of the whole experience, Tony says, “VGS was super easy to get up and running and test. We tested it pretty easily. And once we installed it, it was quickly up and running.”
