Regulatory Compliance: Retail & E-commerce

When millions of transactions are at stake, there is no room for error.

With the emergence of e-commerce, information technology is essential to secure, process, and store the billions of transactions that happen on the internet every year. Batch processing is being replaced by real-time information exchange, and is enabled by a wide range of network-based applications.

But with increased usage and dependence on information technology comes the responsibility to protect it. Clearly, customer-specific data must be kept confidential. Information security technology is also essential to ensure the integrity and availability of the networks and systems used to process customer data - particularly as these increasingly become the lifeblood of retailers' operations.

IT professionals in the retail industry use Metaflows to:

• Support PCI DSS compliance. Batch and real-time exchanges of transaction details with credit card companies and other financial institutions create a link to an environment that is much more tightly controlled, and even regulated. One significant implication of this is that virtually all merchants who process credit card transactions are governed by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) . PCI DSS requires robust access controls and the ability to monitor and audit for security threats. In particular, PCI DSS requires both host intrusion detection (HIDS) and network intrusion detection (NIDS), as well as adequate intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
• Offer a secure shopping experience. With very few exceptions, retailers must complement their physical stores with an online shopping option. This, of course, means having to deal with the wide range of attack vectors presented by an Internet-based storefront: fraud, worms, viruses, malicious hacking, and more. Metaflows can detect Malware and other security threats - including indicators of potentially fraudulent activity.
• Ensure integrity and availability of a vast array of network-based applications. Achieving operational excellence and ensuring a positive shopping experience are dependent on a plethora of network-based applications (e.g., traffic analytics, customer loyalty programs, warehouse management systems, transportation management systems, self-service kiosks, in-store employee training, etc.). The availability, capacity, and performance of associated networks and systems must be ensured for each of these systems. Metaflows allows retail IT professionals to manage these requirements with a single package, in a single, web-based interface.