How to End PCI Compliance Chaos in the Retail Industry

Running PCI DSS compliance for a national retail chain is usually an exercise in (barely) organized chaos. Managing compliance means spending hundreds of hours hunting down lost evidence, tracking down status, or explaining (again) to a regional manager why this year’s compliance evidence shouldn’t be in last year’s folder or emailed.

Your role is critical to the organization, but it’s also an enormous chore. Every new store, every turnover in the field, every missing piece of evidence turns what you hope to be a straightforward process into an annual, nerve-fraying series of crises.

You’re not the only compliance practitioner stuck in this loop — it’s the common story throughout the retail industry. But it isn’t the only story. There are ways to swap the chaos for clarity, without losing your mind (or your nights and weekends).

TCT’s complete guide to PCI DSS Certification

The Chaos of Retail PCI Programs 

One of the biggest problems with PCI management for retail organizations is that you have a whole set of information to collect at the corporate level, and each of your stores has its own set of information to collect as well. It doesn’t take much for your PCI engagement to become incredibly complex as you seek to coordinate activities among individual stores and the personnel associated with corporate.

The corporate entity must have oversight over the compliance program, whereas each individual location only needs to gain access to their own information and supply it up the workflow to corporate HQ (alternatively, your organization may set up with corporate coverage flowing down to each individual location).

All of those moving pieces make it a beast to try to manage a program with this kind of scale and complexity.

Before long, your PCI engagement is a rat’s nest of chaos that literally could take days of toil just to determine the current status. On top of that, the status gathering becomes outdated shortly after you start your collection, because you’ve only captured a snapshot of the item at the time you looked at it.  

The Challenges of Managing PCI Compliance in the Retail Industry

For large retail organizations, PCI DSS poses specific challenges that continually plague most compliance managers and their teams. But the right compliance management tool can eliminate them for good. Let’s take a look at a few of the issues any compliance platform will need to resolve.

Is Your Compliance Engagement Running You?

Manual compliance tracking

Chances are, you’re desperately trying to keep your PCI compliance program together through a manual tracking system — most likely, a set of convoluted spreadsheets. Within your manual system, you have a manually established storage location (which is only loosely used by the personnel provisioning evidence), forced to perform manual status checks, and manual following up with personnel on status of their items.

Every single time you wrap up an annual engagement, you have to go back in and establish all of the new storage locations for the next engagement. That effort involves manually handling all of the access controls. In many cases, you’re moving information through manual consolidation. You have dozens of different storage spots for each retail store and all of that information has to be reorganized in one location under the main corporate engagement.

Coupled with that, you have a PCI QSA who has their own data repository where they want everything to be collected into. So now you have to gather up all of the evidence that you’ve already reorganized and consolidated, and move it into the Assessor’s system.

That’s a tall order for any compliance management system to fill. Maybe you’ve already determined that it can’t be done, and so you’re doubling down on sheer effort and force of will.

Access control concerns

Not only do you need to maintain an organized compliance program that runs smoothly across all entities, you also need to ensure that each location only has access to its own sensitive data. If you’re following role-based access control, you must be able to confidently know that no one can see information that isn’t theirs.

In the midst of all that activity and relocating of data, it’s incredibly onerous to effectively manage role-based access control. Often, effective access control actually creates dysfunctions as you try to move data through the system. 

Imagine trying to create drop zones for each role at each of your store locations. If you have three different roles and 65 store locations, you have to manually create 195 different drop zones, each with their own role-based access controls. Not only do you have to create three times as many drop zones, you also have to monitor and pull evidence from three times as many disparate locations.

If you’re using a manual system, it’s darn near impossible to achieve that kind of access control. Managing data access control adds such a factor of pain that it just isn’t practical. Which means you have people in your system who can access sensitive data they have no right to see. More on that shortly.

The Best PCI-DSS Compliance Management Tool for Franchises

TCT Portal Makes Compliance Management Suck Less

CISOs and compliance practitioners in the retail industry come to TCT because they’re fed up with being continually unable to be effective. They tell us how challenging it is to hold their program together — how many hours and how many people are required to make it happen. We hear the sheer frustration in their voices when we first meet them. 

But a year later, after their first QSA assessment using TCT Portal, they’re exuberant. We see a tremendous change in their demeanor, and they tell us how they finally have capacity to do the meaningful work they love. TCT Portal has offloaded thousands of hours of onerous manual work and they’re enjoying a whole new level of performance and productivity.

TCT Portal eliminates all of the wasted time on engagements that used to require manual activities. It isn’t unusual for companies to report reducing their time and effort by 65 percent. Here’s a few ways the platform does that.

Live status and automated reminders

The time it takes to attempt to even determine the status of your engagement one time is painful — then you have the honor of herding the compliance cats, manually following up with each member of the evidence submission team to submit their items.

TCT Portal status is live, saving literally hundreds to thousands of hours per engagement.  The best part is that the system will take care of automatic reminders to the various members with items in their hands. Whether it’s nagging the evidence submitters or reminding the Assessor team they have open items in their hands, sit back and let the system do the work.

Simplify evidence submission

Often, security and compliance engagements require the same information from multiple locations. 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 locations. 

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 resultant compliance track(s). Tens, even hundreds of line items are populated in an instant.

This functionality also works for more than one resultant compliance track, so especially if your organization is subject to multiple certifications or standards, you submit the evidence once and watch the system populate the evidence across multiple certifications in the system.

Instead of looking through each requirement for each target certification line by line, you can use the document request list to simply view the evidence you need to supply. You can easily go down the list, item by item, and supply what’s on it, just once. 

Eliminate confusion and rework

Because you’ve created the document request list for your specific organization, you can provide instructions that your personnel will easily understand. No more PCI terms and techno-babble that make no sense. You can even reference company-specific terms 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. Once you’ve concluded one full year on the system, that information is now available in year 2 and beyond for the next group of evidence submitters to reference. Personnel can find and submit the right information more quickly and with less frustration. Fewer items get missed, because you’re working off of a clear, clean checklist.

9 Must-have Resources to Make PCI Compliance Easier

Manage perfect access control

Ensure your sublocation frontline personnel only see the items they need to provide. Turn on Restricted Mode and role-based access is automatically built in within TCT Portal at the user level. Assign Fred an item, and only Fred can see that data. Likewise, Fred can only see the data he’s responsible for.

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, your way

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) 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 the 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 you system to a secondary Assessor specific system, saving even more time and dysfunction.

Control Your Compliance Management Chaos 

With TCT Portal, your retail 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 drive security, 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 engagement, you don’t have to stay stuck in a manual system.

TCT Portal is the retail industry’s way out of manual madness. Regain control of the chaos, and discover compliance management that sucks less. Run your PCI compliance program the way you want — request a demo today.