As further changes to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) come into force by March 31st 2025, organisations responsible for processing card and payment data are once again tasked with achieving necessary compliance. These new measures are currently considered to be best practices, but will become mandatory for meeting the standard.
Measured through annual audit cycles, many organisations only turn the light onto the latest requirements ahead of an upcoming assessment. But while these initiatives are typically audited at a single point, the process of ensuring compliance and maintaining high industry standards should be seen as always-on.
By taking a more proactive, continuous approach to not just PCI compliance, but other industry standards and certifications, businesses can reduce the admin burden, streamline auditing workflows and achieve ongoing peace of mind.
The Current Compliance Landscape
In businesses of every size, ensuring ongoing compliance and meeting audit requirements presents an administrative minefield. In the case of PCI DSS, collecting evidence for a Report on Compliance (RoC) can distract from business operations, and, as a result, these tasks are put on the back burner until an approaching audit deadline.
This annualised approach bears significant cost implications – in order to meet audit requirements, emergency fixes and “needs must” solutions are deployed to ensure the business meets required standards. Combined with the need to gather evidence, this means the organisation as a whole can be disrupted by annual “compliance chaos” as audits approach and teams scramble to meet their commitments.
A single annual audit in such an environment is challenging enough, yet many businesses have a range of compliance standards they need to meet, including industry-recognised standards such as ISO 27001, and Cyber Essentials. If these audits are approached one-at-a-time, then effort is duplicated at multiple points each year.
This is compounded even further by the complexity of modern IT environments. While most public cloud providers can offer Attestations of Compliance (AoCs) to prove that they meet the PCI compliance standard, these only prove that the cloud environment as a whole is secure. But for your organisation’s cloud environment, compliance requirements are divided in accordance with your provider’s Shared Responsibility Model, splitting the burden, especially in the case of security. Failure to meet or evidence the obligations placed on your business within the outlined regulatory time frames presents an unwanted headache.
Compliance Confidence with a Continuous Approach
Fortunately, there is a better approach that businesses can take. A continuous compliance model makes it easier to meet the requirements of PCI DSS, as well as other industry standards like ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials.
A continuous approach brings compliance workflows into everyday operations, ensuring that the organisation’s core operational processes, including relevant IT systems, continue to conform with industry requirements throughout the year.
While this might seem like an additional admin burden, adopting such an approach actually reduces compliance overheads. By assessing standards and collating required information at more regular junctures, you can ensure that relevant information and evidence of compliance is at hand whenever required.
This is especially useful when ensuring compliance with multiple standards – the requirements for these standards are rarely unique, so, by adopting a continuous approach, multiple requirements can be dealt with simultaneously. This eliminates the need for quick fixes to be deployed, helping to streamline the wider IT environment while also making auditing a breeze. When audits are needed, the required evidence and documentations are already available.
Beyond efficiency, continuous compliance also helps to ensure cyber security, as continuous monitoring of the environment ensures potential vulnerabilities are spotted and remediated before they can become a vector for cyber attacks.
Preparing for the future
Implementing a continuous approach is a lot easier with the right tools and resources at your back. While cloud platforms can often become a cyber security black hole for many businesses, they can be leveraged to enhance security, and ensure compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS.
There are a number of cloud-based tools and services, available from most public cloud providers to help with compliance. For example, Microsoft Azure users can benefit from Azure Policy, which stands out in this regard, offering a unified dashboard that highlights unmet requirements within your cloud environments to help IT and security teams easily track compliance. This includes genuine insights into the Shared Responsibility Model, and the areas where both your organisation and your provider are ensuring the relevant standards are met, as well as any areas where further remediations are required.
This is already a powerful tool, removing the need to manually check off requirements and helping to streamline the Shared Responsibility Model, but Azure Policy goes even further with the ability to automatically implement compliance requirements, ensuring a consistent approach across the business.
Getting started
An effective implementation of continuous compliance doesn’t just require good tooling – it needs technical expertise and strategic vision to back it up. At CSA Cyber, we have helped countless customers enhance their IT environments, ensuring they meet the requirements of PCI DSS, ISO27001, Cyber Essentials, and other standards. Working in conjunction with FluidOne, we design and deploy secure solutions that don’t just check boxes, but help enhance your business and deliver meaningful value.
If you’re interested in making the move to continuous compliance, or just need some guidance on meeting a particular PCI DSS requirement, we’re here to help. Just fill out our form and our experts will be ready to discuss your needs, helping to ensure your current defences are keeping you, and your customers, safe.
