New Payment Tokenization Service Unveiled for the Akamai Cloud
Akamai Technologies today unveiled an “Edge Tokenization” electronic payment security service that automates credit card tokenization within the Akamai cloud, keeping payment data off the networks of eCommerce providers.
Developed to integrate into retailer’s existing eCommerce environments, the Akamai solution enables credit card data to be converted to a token prior to Web transactions landing on a merchant’s infrastructure. By alleviating the requirement for retailers to route customer credit card data on their own infrastructure, the service helps reduce data theft and compliance risk while lowering PCI DSS compliance costs.
Utlizing Akamai’s cloud infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers, the solution enables credit card data to be identified and replaced with an anonymous token, which along with the true card number, is stored in a secure data vault managed by the tokenization provider.
Akamai has integrated its cloud technology with the tokenization solutions from its partner CyberSource, enabling Akamai’s customers integration to enterprise payment tokenization services.
“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, CyberSource. “Akamai’s Edge Tokenization automatically combines the concept of hosted payment acceptance and payment tokenization with cloud-based web infrastructure, making it easy for online merchants to meet compliance requirements with less cost, complexity and time.”
“PCI DSS compliance has been a cost of doing business and can be substantial. For example, the reported cost for annual compliance assessments can be well into six figures and this does not count the costs to change systems and operations to become compliant,” states Michael Suby, vice president of research at Stratecast. “Leveraging a service like Edge Tokenization offers eCommerce companies an innovative way to reduce these costs while still protecting against card data breaches.”
Akamai interacts with existing payment gateway Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to tokenize card and cardholder information without ever storing higher-risk data to disk. Because this transaction occurs on Akamai’s level 1 PCI-compliant network, this replacement occurs securely and close to the end user, which further reduces potential risks.
Additionally, by removing credit card data from the online merchant’s infrastructure, Edge Tokenization helps customers conduct business more confidently in the cloud.