I was on a panel discussion at the recently concluded Retail Technology COnference in Orlando. Panel had following distingushed leaders of this industry,

  1. Rob Garf, V.P Retail Segment, AMR Researchhttp://www.amrresearch.com/images/Header/AMRResearchLogo.gif
  2. Tony Bates, COO & Partner at PSC, Inc PSC
  3. James Paul, VP, Consulting, AmbironTrustWave 
  4. Moin Moinuddin, Industry Architect, Microsoft Corporation

There were around 60+ mainly retailers in the room. Audience included CTOs, CIOs, VP of product development from Retail organizations. It was a very lively discussion around following key topics,

  • More guidance for compliance
  • Data encryption
  • Incentives or fines for compliance or non-compliance
  • Benefits of compliance in addition simply meeting the requirements
  • PCI DSS Council

Important point to remember is that, PCI Compliance not helps you in meeting simply the requirement but also enhances overall security of your organization and also reduces cost of maintenance. For example a retailer who had never really done an internal assessment before now did this and resulted in consolidation of servers in the stores using Virtual server product. So this helps in reducing overall cost of maintenance in addition to improving security.