PCI compliance is a critical step in protecting your business from data breaches and security risks, and also avoiding complications and fees from financial institutions. While it is worth the effort, it takes an extensive amount of work (and money) to get your certification.

You don’t have to do it the hard way, though. PCI automated platforms allow you to streamline the process and make your PCI compliance smoother. Can your business benefit from PCI automated platforms? Let’s take a closer look at these innovative tools and the advantages of putting them to use for your business.

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What are PCI automated platforms?

PCI automated platforms are tools designed to automate as many components of your PCI compliance as possible. While these platforms vary in their capabilities, Vanta, in particular, will scan your system and look for each of the requirements within the PCI standards or PCI DSS to see which requirements you meet and which you still need to complete. It also compiles documentation for your PCI audit and reporting and it monitors your compliance over time to keep you protected.

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Benefits of using a PCI automated platform

Is it worth it to add a PCI automated platform to your toolbox? If your business needs to be PCI compliant, you stand to benefit from several key advantages.

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1. Save time

Most businesses don’t have employees sitting around with time to spare - especially not engineers. The engineering time that is involved in just investigating your system to assess which compliance requirements it meets, let alone configuring the software and security measures to become fully compliant, can take away critical development time from your product or other aspects of the business.

PCI automated platforms, however, minimize your engineering time as well as the administrative time you spend coordinating your PCI compliance. They’ll do the initial assessment for you so your engineers have a clear list of protocols to implement in order to reach compliance. If you’ve already worked toward compliance with other security standards and protocols, you may be surprised how much overlap there is between them and your engineers may have little left to do for PCI compliance.

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2. Save money

Time is money, as the saying goes, and that’s especially true when it comes to the expensive time of experienced and highly educated engineers. All that time you save in your PCI compliance process adds up to resources you can dedicate instead to other pursuits that can give you a strong return in revenue.

It’s not only your engineering time that will allow you to save money when you use a platform like Vanta, though. Because Vanta has a network of vetted and skilled auditors, you don’t need to spend added money finding and hiring external auditors. When you’ve scanned your system with Vanta and received a report with all the PCI requirements met, you can also rest assured that you’ll only need to complete your audit once rather than failing the first and paying for a second.

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3. Make organization easier

PCI compliance is a multi-faceted process that requires a lot of coordination, documentation, and collaboration. If the documents and protocols you need are stored in different places or if you need a collection of passwords and tools to access them all, you’re headed for an avoidable headache.

With Vanta, on the other hand, everything is collected and stored in one place - your documentation, your system scans, your monitoring protocols, and so on. This makes it easier for your own team to stay on top of your PCI compliance, but it also allows for a quicker and smoother auditing process.

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4. Simplify continuous monitoring

PCI compliance isn’t a one-time project. To remain compliant, you need to have monitoring systems in place. Updates to your system, your cloud configuration, your plug-ins, and more can open security holes that jeopardize your PCI compliance.

Manually assessing your compliance repeatedly is cumbersome and time-consuming. PCI automated platforms, however, can continuously monitor your system for compliance so you can simply let it run and resolve any new issues that arise.

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Using PCI automated platforms to benefit your business

As necessary as PCI compliance is for protecting your business and protecting all of us as consumers, it can be a major expense for businesses of all sizes. PCI automated platforms are designed to take the burden off your shoulders and simplify your compliance from the start.

Learn more about getting PCI compliant

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