Point Of Sale Security, Meet Point Of Sale Expansion

October 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Gregory Boardman, senior vice president of product and development, Ingenico

As retailers expand the point of sale presence to meet dynamic new service requirements, synchronizing payment technology minimizes costs and complexity while maintaining high levels of security.

Securing a card data environment remains an evolving and vast undertaking. This is true even in the modest afterglow of the launch of data field encryption and tokenization, while on the precipice of the impending transition to EMV (EuroPay, MasterCard, Visa) technology that will finally stifle the plague of card reproduction fraud. Businesses of every size and style are addressing an assortment of security-focused objectives, with special attention on a host of payment terminals, POS registers, and other card acceptance points. Each must undergo some level of upgrade or modification to incorporate data protection tools. By itself, this can be a daunting exercise, but what happens when those points multiply, become mobile, or must be unmanned? At stake for the retailer that does not maintain a holistic approach to its data security needs are years of pain supporting multiple technologies to achieve the same goal. This mass inefficiency, coupled with a changing support structure, could actually counteract the card data security objective.