Akamai Introduces PCI-compliant Site Acceleration Service

The PCI Standards Security Council, comprising of American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, recently increased pressure on commerce organizations to protect their customers’ credit card data. This heightened pressure has included severe punitive consequences for noncompliance, including fines or loss of privileges to accept credit card payments, or to use the credit cards’ brands. Akamai is now the first and only transaction acceleration service that is certified for compliance with PCI, securely improving the performance and reliability of commerce Web sites and ecommerce transactions.

“Historically, as retailers have worked to achieve compliance, they have had to engage with their technology partners to certify compliance,” said Andy Ellis, chief security architect, Akamai. “As a response, we have created a solution that accelerates site transactions in a secure manner, while making it faster and easier to achieve PCI compliance. For the majority of our commerce customers, PCI compliance remains one of their top requirements.”

To become PCI compliant, Akamai undertook an audit of its globally-distributed network and information security policies and systems. The audit covered the Akamai Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) network and all of the associated management tools, processes and procedures.

“The PCI security standards have laid out requirements for securing network, protecting cardholder data and regulating security systems,” said Steven Trimbo, Director, Online Operations, Best Buy. “Compliance with PCI is essential for us in order to offer our customers the convenience of online credit card transactions. It is critical that our technology partner Akamai is prepared and well positioned to provide a secure and reliable protection platform, helping us to meet the highest of industry security standards.”

“Having a PCI compliant transaction acceleration infrastructure is one of the critical requirements for today’s e-commerce businesses as we handle large amounts of sensitive customer payment data,” said Jim Moran, Chief Information Security Officer, Educational Testing Service, an organization that helps to advance quality and equity in education for all people worldwide. “The Akamai PCI site acceleration service allows us to optimize the performance of our e-commerce systems while ensuring transactions are handled in a PCI compliant manner, making for a faster and more secure end user experience.”

The Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator solution enables ecommerce companies to not only accelerate their dynamic site transaction and rich Web 2.0 content, but also accelerates all of their sites transactions including search, add-to-cart and check out. By achieving PCI standards, Akamai will further improve its transaction acceleration services by offering an industry first -- the Dynamic Site Accelerator PCI solution for speeding up secure credit card transactions online in a PCI compliant manner.

“Businesses who use Akamai’s new Dynamic Site Accelerator PCI service will be able to more rapidly obtain PCI compliance of their Akamai SSL infrastructure in a much more cost effective manner,” said Chris Mark, President, The Aegenis Group, a regulatory compliance and risk management consulting organization.

“The Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator PCI service is a big help to online merchants - not only proactively supporting its customers' PCI compliance efforts, but also accelerating their secure credit card transactions in a PCI manner.”

Available today as a beta service, Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator PCI will be commercially available in the first quarter of 2008.