Introduction
Numerous high-profile security breaches in the retail and payment card processing industries drove the development of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a mandatory standard that is having a significant impact upon all retailers and credit card processors. This paper describes the role played by Bradford Networks’ adaptive security platform, and Network Sentry product family, in helping to meet the requirements of PCI DSS, and to secure networks more effectively.
How Bradford’s Network Sentry Helps Organizations Achieve Compliance with PCI DSS
The PCI DSS requires organizations in the payment processing chain to secure both their networks and the systems on which cardholder data is processed or stored. Bradford’s Network Sentry secures internal networks by ensuring the health and identity of devices connected to them, and provides network-wide visibility and tracking of every user, every endpoint device, and every network connection. Bradford solutions address network access and control issues that cannot be addressed by legacy firewalls and host-based identity and access management solutions.
Bradford’s Network Sentry enables PCI DSS compliance by automating enforcement of strict access control policies to ensure that users and devices attaching to networks are authorized to do so, and that they meet specific security policy requirements. Network Sentry provides detailed logging and reporting functionality — including PCI-specific reporting templates — for full visibility of network activity. Logs and reports can be used in the process of PCI audits to demonstrate compliance. In all, Network Sentry helps to address 9 of the 12 PCI requirements.
Network Sentry is an out-of-band security platform that leverages an organization’s existing network infrastructure to enforce security policies. Leading analysts characterize out-of-band implementations as the most secure, most scalable, most flexible, and most cost-effective solutions for automating network access control.