The Internet has created opportunities for many things, but one of the most exciting for most consumers and businesses is the ability to process payment transactions via credit card accounts. This ability has created a great deal of exciting avenues for business, but like any good thing, there are some pretty strong downsides as well. The most compelling of these downsides is potential security breaches.
The Security Problem
When this kind of payment became a more popular mode of doing business ten years ago, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) was launched by the Security Standards Council, and with this came some fairly staunch rules to protect cardholder information. Any company who chooses to accept payments from clients in this manner has the responsibility to try and offer a secure way to accept and process the sensitive information necessary to make the transaction work.
Sadly, even with these regulations in place, “more than 234 million records with sensitive information have been breached since January 2005”, according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.org . The standards are there to offer protection, but as the security measures become more sophisticated, so do the criminals.
DMS Is the Solution
If you work in an office in any capacity, then you are likely aware of document management software (DMS) technology. In many offices, these programs are used as a way to make the office more efficient by going paperless. While this is a very important feature of these programs, there is a lot more to it than just making your office more environmentally friendly.
The files that are stored and organized in these applications management programs have to be made secure. The servers are designed to be easy to navigate and difficult to break into without the proper authority. While the search engine technology of Google is used to make recalling information simpler, none of the information is made public in any way.
When you have a program that is already designed to take in large amounts of data and safely store it all in an organized fashion, then you have the right infrastructure management in place to create a safe place for credit card data to be stored when the right additions of code and design are put into place.
As you can see, the initial design of such programs is made to be secure in order to protect the vital and often sensitive information stored. In order to maintain compliance with PCI standards, increasingly in-depth programs were created by companies like eFileCabinet to make these transactions even more secure.
Secure Drawer
Secure Drawer is one of the supreme examples of a DMS application that offers safe platforms for credit card transactions. The following is a list of some of the best features to be found in this program:
- Data Encryption: One of the best keys to keeping data safe is making sure that it is encrypted while being transferred from one place to another via the Internet. Secure Drawer utilizes SSL/TLS encryption to keep all transferred information safe from prying eyes.
- Secure Socket Layer Technology: This is another layer of encryption technology that is utilized when sensitive data is transferred on data servers. The more layers of encryption there are, the less likely hackers will be to obtain information or to be able to make any sense of information they are able to glean from the system.
- Digital Signatures: Verification is another major problem when it comes to using credit card technology for processing payments. The numbers might all match up, but how can you be sure that the person holding the card bears the same name that is on it? Offering an option to ask for a signature can help the business track what the signature should look like, and can send alerts when there are major changes in the pattern. This is an important layer of security on client sharing portals.
- Fast Transaction Speeds: The longer a transaction takes, the longer the information is in danger of being sniped by prying eyes. Secure Drawer guarantees fast transaction speeds, and has a very short cancellation time. This means that should a glitch cause the transaction to take longer than usual, it will immediately time out and remove the information from the system. This is a protection strategy that works very well and frustrates many information poachers. You want the client sharing portals to be secure, and this can’t happen when there are lags in transactions of this nature.
- DMS Integration: If you are working with a company that has a DMS program and a separate PCI transfer program, then you are not as secure or as organized as you could be. You want a system like Secure Drawer that will immediately and smoothly integrate with your DMS programs.
- Ease of Use: While so much work is done on computers, humans are still punching the buttons and making the calls. This means there is the potential for human error to cause a security breach. A system that is easy for a business to use will remove many of the issues of human errors.
- 24/7 Tech Support: You want to invest in a program that will provide the necessary tech support when something goes wrong. Issues with PCI are a big deal, so you want to know that you will have someone ready and informed to help you with any issue at any time.