Small business, risk management and data security standards
Posted on | September 24, 2008 | Comments Off
In case you didn’t know it, if you accept credit card payments, you need to be in compliance with the data security standards developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. That’s true whether you are a point-of-service merchant who swipes your customers’ credit cards or whether you are an online microbusiness merchant who never sees your customers’ private data.
In fact, if you are one of the latter, your compliance chores are complicated by the fact that it’s up to you to make sure all the third-party service providers that handle and process that data for you are PCI compliant. That includes your web hosting company, your merchant bank, your virtual terminal and/or payment gateway, and your shopping cart software provider. For help, check with your merchant bank; they will probably have compliance assistance available.
For more information and compliance tips, check out my article, “Are You PCI Compliant?”, published today at the American Express OPEN Forum blog.





Dawn Rivers Baker, aka The Journal Blogger, is the editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal, and the self-proclaimed Socrates of the small business blogosphere. See her 

