An electronic security payment system that converts credit card data into a token prior to landing on the merchant’s infrastructure has been unveiled.
Akamai Technologies Inc, provider of cloud optimisation services, has released an edge tokenisation electronic payment security service.
Edge tokenisation is “seamless and undisruptive” to a retailer’s existing e-commerce workflow, a company statement said, and “the solution enables credit card data to be converted to a token prior to web transactions landing on a merchant’s infrastructure”.
Information theft
By eliminating the need to route customer credit card data through the merchant’s infrastructure, it helps reduce information theft and lowers payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) compliance costs.
“PCI DSS compliance has been a cost of doing business and can be substantial … Leveraging a service like edge tokenisation offers e-commerce companies an innovative way to reduce these costs while still protecting against card data breaches,” Michael Suby, vice-president of research at Stratecast (a division of Frost & Sullivan), said in a statement.
A first-of-its-kind offering, edge tokenisation automates credit card tokenisation within the Akamai cloud, providing high levels of payment security and operational convenience for web retailers without the need to increase spending on internal infrastructure.
“We’ve always maintained merchants shouldn’t seek to secure payment data, but instead, eliminate contact with it,” said Michael Walsh, president and chief executive officer with Akamai’s partner CyberSource.
“Akamai’s edge tokenisation automatically combines the concept of hosted payment acceptance and payment tokenisation with cloud-based web infrastructure, making it easy for online merchants to meet compliance requirements with less cost, complexity and time,” he added.
By removing credit card data from the online merchant’s infrastructure, edge tokenisation helps customers conduct business more confidently in the cloud.
