TCT Portal Solves Hotels’ Most Complex Compliance Needs

PCI DSS has been around for decades — long before sophisticated compliance management tools have been available. So if your hotel organization is more than a few years old, you’re probably using old, ingrained systems to manage PCI compliance. But those systems rely on manual heavy lifting and outdated technologies, which means you’re putting yourself through a lot more compliance pain than you need to.

You may even be so used to doing what you’ve always done that you’ve become numb to the notion that compliance management doesn’t have to suck. The way you’ve always done it may manage (painfully) to get you across the finish line every year, but it’s cutting into your profit margins, holding back your compliance maturity, and killing a lot of the joy in your work.

If your hotel organization is using a manual or semi-manual system, it’s likely a conglomeration of homegrown tools and ridiculously complex spreadsheets, paired with a file share drop zone and disorganized email folders.

When compliance season comes around again, you’ve got to gather the troops and build out another set of sprawling spreadsheets and evidence repositories. You’ll successfully get your Assessor’s sign-off on PCI compliance for another year, but it’ll happen through brute force and Herculean willpower.

But what if it doesn’t have to be that way? 

TCT Portal Makes Hotel Compliance Management Suck Less

What if compliance management was a streamlined, efficient workflow that saved hundreds of man-hours per year and tens of thousands of dollars in lost profits? 

And what if you could actually focus on meaningful projects instead of evaporating hours of your life managing low-level compliance tasks?

TCT Portal helps global hotel organizations to get unstuck from manual compliance management hell. The transition is simple and fast — and you can even keep your current compliance vendors and Assessors. In fact, many PCI QSAs are some of our biggest fans.

Let’s take a look at how TCT Portal meets hotels’ most complex compliance needs — and makes compliance management suck less.

Status Updates at a Glance

How long does it take you to figure out the status of your PCI compliance engagement before each status meeting? Two hours? More than that? How many times a week do you need to figure out status? 

In the time you spend updating the status, what are the chances that someone has submitted evidence or made a change that you didn’t catch, because you can’t look at live data? It’s impossible to get an accurate status update, because every time you go through the manual process, you’re looking at outdated information. Human nature is to fling updated information right before the meeting, so the entire exercise is a losing battle.

TCT Portal gives you a live view of your compliance engagement. You can see the entire status with just a glance, saving literally hundreds to thousands of hours per engagement, each year.  

Dread Checking Compliance Engagement Status? Do It in Under 15 Minutes.

Even better: the system sends automatic reminders to each team member with a task that’s due. Whether it’s nagging the evidence submitters or reminding the Assessor team they have open items in their hands, you can sit back and let the system do the heavy lifting.

TCT’s status capabilities provide an enormous time and money saving advantage. Many of our clients report reducing man hours by as much as 65 percent. Imagine how much your hotel corporation could save! Better yet, get the numbers yourself with our ROI calculator.

Simple Evidence Submission

One of the complexities of compliance management in the hotel industry is that you need to collect the same information from multiple hotel sub-entities. For example, hundreds of requirements will ask for the information and security policy. Typically, that means attaching the policy to each one of those hundreds of line items. 

But TCT Portal’s document request list eliminates that work. The document request list asks for each piece of evidence once and then automatically populates it to every instance it’s required in the destination compliance tracks. Hundreds of line items can be populated in an instant. 

Instead of combing through each line item within each compliance framework, you can use the document request list to simply view the evidence you need to submit. Easily go down the list and supply what’s on it, just once. All the rest of the work is taken care of for you.

When you’re rolling up evidence from your sub-entities to the corporate level, it’s easy to track which location provided each piece of evidence. So if there’s a question about a particular piece of evidence, you know where it came from and who to communicate with to resolve the issue.

NOTE: Many hotel locations typically roll evidence up to the corporate level. However, if your organization needs to flow information down from corporate to sub-entities, we can flip the order in TCT Portal. Either way, once configured, the system does the work for you.

One List to Rule Multiple Certifications

Chances are, your hotel company has multiple certification standards to comply with. Not only do you have PCI DSS, but you may also need to comply with HIPAA and several others. 

After you’ve set up your document request list for PCI, you can then look at the requirements for HIPAA. Create a unique list of request items to support HIPAA, and the document request list will map all of the elements to both PCI and HIPAA simultaneously. So as you submit your overall information security policy, TCT Portal will automatically populate it in every line item where it’s required across PCI DSS as well as HIPAA — and any other certification you’re going up against.

The best part: if your Assessor requests a change to a piece of evidence, you only have to make the change once and upload the new version once. TCT Portal replaces all of the previous version destinations with the new one automatically across all of your in scope standards.

No more manually copying evidence to multiple line items. Just submit it once and you’re done — even if the evidence is needed in dozens or hundreds of places. Imagine the hours you’ll save and the human errors you’ll eliminate with this one function that TCT Portal provides.

Eliminate Confusion and Rework

Because you’ve created the document request list for your specific organization, you can write your own instructions that your personnel will easily understand. No more PCI terms and compliance jargon that make no sense to the average evidence provisioner. You can even reference company-specific terms, technology and documents, if you wish.

TCT Portal makes it crystal clear who needs to do what. That means fewer questions come to you about how to find evidence, and fewer submissions with the wrong evidence. Personnel can find and submit the right information more quickly and with less frustration.

9 Must-have Resources to Make PCI Compliance Easier

Role-Based Access Control in a Snap

Concerned about access control? There’s a lot of sensitive information to be collected and submitted, and it’s critical to ensure that only the right eyes see the right data. TCT Portal makes this easy, even when you’re dealing with multiple roles across multiple sub-entities. 

Restricted Mode automatically controls role-based access at the user level. For example, assign Fred an item, and only Fred can see that data. Likewise, Fred can only see the tasks that he’s responsible for. At the corporate level, you can segment permissions so that each department can only see its own items — for example, HR can only see HR related items, and the legal department can only see legal evidence.

While your evidence provisioning team can only see the document request list, the compliance management team at the corporate level can see the request list as well as the entire PCI track. Not only can the compliance management team see the request list for that location, but they can see all of the locations submitting evidence across your engagement. 

This makes it easy for the compliance team to have complete oversight on both sides of the engagement. They can work off of the request list as needed, then conclude their activities in the PCI compliance track and collaborate with your Assessor in that track.

Compliance Management That Fits Your Workflow

When you set up your compliance program in TCT Portal, you aren’t restricted to doing it the way the software wants you to do it. You can customize the workflow however you want. For example, you can submit evidence to your entire compliance team or establish an initial quality assurance step (to perform a quick sanity check of the submission) by the evidence provisioner’s manager before the items head to the compliance team. Whatever you want your workflow to look like, you’ve got it in TCT Portal.

This also applies to the way you work with your Assessor. Customize how and when evidence gets submitted to your QSA — and let TCT Portal do the submissions for you. It’s a completely hands-off transfer. Most importantly, no more loading the evidence from your system to a secondary Assessor specific system, saving even more time and dysfunction.

Ongoing Compliance Is Easy and Quick

TCT Portal is a game changer right out of the gate, but it’s even better in Year 2 and beyond. With multiple years under your belt, you have a rock-solid repository with a historical record of everything that was done in previous years. You can see exactly what evidence was supplied, what screen shots were needed, comments from the Assessor, and more.

In a lot of cases, your Assessor won’t be able to look at every one of your locations — there are just too many subentities to make it practical. Instead, the Assessor will do sampling from all of your locations. You won’t have any idea which locations will be sampled until the Assessor is doing it, so it’s on you to be prepared as you walk into the annual assessment. That means staying on top of every daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual task, across every single location.

TCT Portal’s Operational Mode makes it easy to maintain all of your compliance activities on schedule. Operational Mode automatically notifies evidence provisioners as periodic requirements come up throughout the year. Automated reminders are sent to the right people at the right time, so tasks are clear and manageable. 

Operational Mode helps you avoid that chaotic rush of activity. When the annual assessment arrives, you already have all of your evidence ready to go. There’s no chaos, no mad rush, no tough questions to answer with your Assessor about missing evidence.

You can now collect that evidence from every one of your locations, all year long, without missing a beat. This is a monumental shift, because now you’re managing your compliance engagement instead of it managing you.

Ideal for High-Turnover Industries Like Hospitality

Operational Mode is especially helpful in hotel engagements, because the industry has a high level of turnover. When you’re looking at turnover across dozens or hundreds of locations, that means every year you’re training new employees how to gather and submit evidence. 

TCT Portal’s repository is gold, because new hires can see exactly what passed muster last year and simply replicate it. New employees can hit the ground running and contribute to the engagement right out of the gate. 

TCT Portal makes it easy to switch in new people into the system, too. Because you’re likely to drop new hires into a similar role as the last person had, you can simply apply all of the previous person’s settings to the new hire with the click of a button. You’re up and running in just minutes.

Related: Managing Compliance in High Turnover Industries

Gain Control of Your Compliance Management Chaos 

With TCT Portal, your hotel organization can achieve the most efficient, most customizable, and most user-first solution available. Communication with sublocations is a breeze, evidence submission is unbelievably fast and efficient, and information access is always protected.

You took this job to protect the company, not orchestrate evidence scavenger hunts. If running your PCI program is burning out your best people, eating all your attention, lighting a match to hundreds of wasted hours, or leaving you sweating about the next Assessment, break the cycle of insanity.

TCT Portal is the hotel industry’s way out of compliance madness. Gain control over the chaos, and discover compliance management that sucks less. Run your PCI compliance program the way you’ve wished for — request a demo today.