PCI Compliance Athena FirePAC And ReportZone

With a steady increase in identity theft and payment card information fraud, there is a growing need for PCI compliance to not only protect customers but also to comply with rules and regulations set forth by the payment card information securities standards council. The PCI DSS, a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security, was developed for this purpose by PCI Security Standards Council. Any company which completes transactions that involve processing credit or debit cards need to comply with the rules and tests required by the PCI DSS. An analysis of all firewalls and a check of overall security of consumer credit information are important, as these rules require a security scan yearly which can often be both costly and time consuming.

PCI Information Protection Is Of The Greatest Importance

Credit information is often stored or transferred between merchants whenever a credit transaction is completed. This credit information not only includes personal information about your customers, it also includes their credit account information which if left vulnerable to hacking can result in identity and credit account theft. This makes the strength and design of the firewalls that protect this information extremely important. Not only the effectiveness of firewalls is important, but they also need to pass a yearly audit to prove their strength and ability to protect customer information.

Optimize Your Firewall Using Athena FirePAC

Athena FirePAC is a firewall analysis tool which helps to drastically reduce the time and stress which can be involved in a PCI compliance audit. Check here http://www.athenasecurity.net/pcicompliance.html

Athena FirePAC uses several distinct steps to help optimize your firewall policies and simplify the audit process. To show you an accurate view of the effect of any change in policies, the steps include policy analysis, anomaly detection and a comparison of policies.

Further information on the Athena FirePAC system can be found at http://www.athenasecurity.net/athenafirepac.html.

PCI Compliance Is Mandatory

Companies which do process or transmit any credit information, no way around them, are required to perform security scan at least annually and conform to the rules set by the PCI DSS. Compliance, among other things, requires a self audit questionnaire completed once a year which is made much easier by keeping firewalls neat and reducing the redundant and unnecessary rules within your firewall. Failure to follow the rules set by the PCI DSS can result not only in a merchant's loss of the ability , but also importantly run the huge risk of losing the customer information to dubious elements of society.

To ensure that all your customer information remains safe from hackers, a PCI compliance audit is required. Whether you need to perform a yearly or quarterly audit, a compliance audit is an important tool in understanding how your firewall rules and policies compare to the industry standard. Conducting of a PCI compliance audit may be complicating and confusing For a complete step by step explanation of how Athena FirePAC can simplify your PCI Compliance and audit processes see the FirePAC PCI compliance report at http://www.athenasecurity.net/pdf/acmecorp-pix-PCIDSSCompliance.pdf

Athena FirePAC Simplifies PCI Audit

To make the complicated process in dealing with day to day PCI compliance concerns or in completing an audit of your firewall rules and policies, Athena FirePAC is helpful. http://www.athenasecurity.net/reportzone.html can be checked for simplest and most convenient way to obtain Athena's analysis reports. With this service, Athena does all the work.
To get faster results with no training or ramp up time with the responsibility of ensuring how firewalls comply with networks design goals, security policies, best practices or PCI requirement, ReportZone helps.

Author is an expert on PCI Audit and PCI Compliance.