PowerTech Joins PCI Standards Body

Published: January 15, 2008

by Alex Woodie

PowerTech has joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a participating organization, providing another i5/OS voice in the continuing evolution of the standard.

As one of 384 participating organizations, PowerTech will work with the group to evolve the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) and other payment card data protection standards backed by financial giants like American Express, Discover Card, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa, which took the initiative in creating the DSS.

"We are pleased to be accepted as a participating organization in this important security standards organization," says Jon Scott, president and CEO of PowerTech. "The IBM System i running i5/OS is a critical platform for credit card payment processing, and while it is highly reliable, it is often left wide open for attack simply by not being configured properly. By joining the Council, we hope to add our particular knowledge in helping organizations close this security gap."

Being a participating organization will allow PowerTech to see advance copies of changes to the DSS, and to be able to comment on them and provide feedback as the standards develop, says Brendan Patterson, vice president of marketing for PowerTech. That input will be important to provide some representation for the thousands of System i shops that are affected by the PCI DSS, but which will have little to no input into the ongoing development of the standard.

"A lot of these standards are written from the perspective of a more Windows, Linux, distributed world, so we'd be able to provide some System i input in specific areas," Patterson says.

Other i5/OS software vendors that are members of the PCI Security Standards Council include Linoma Software, nuBridges, Patrick Townsend & Associates, and Protegrity.

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