Onyx Group achieve PCI DSS compliance

3rd February 2015

T infrastructure and support provider Onyx Group is celebrating after their flagship site was certified as compliant to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The company, which invested £2m into the region with the opening of their Yorkshire Data Centre in Rotherham in 2012, expects a number of additional sites, including their Yorkshire facility, to follow suit and be PCI DSS compliant in early 2015. The v3.0 level 1 certification means that Onyx customers' hosted systems can be involved in a variety of payment channels in a fully audited and certified facility. Neil Stephenson, CEO of Onyx Group, said: -As a company we are committed to offering our clients across Yorkshire the very best in terms of cutting edge security and resilience. -Achieving PCI DSS was the next step in our ongoing strategy to offer businesses superior I.T. services and is indicative of the continued investment that we are making to our infrastructure. -We will now work to achieve this compliance across our other sites and aim to have achieved this standard in Yorkshire in 2015. -By passing the rigorous compliance assessment, we can now help to remove the burden associated with meeting such high standards, allowing our customers to focus on what is most important to them; their business. PCI DSS was developed in 2004 by major credit card companies to encourage and enhance cardholder data security and facilitate the adoption of consistent measures globally. Today any company that stores, transmits or processes cardholder data has to comply with the requirements. Online retail sales broke through the £100 billion barrier for the first time in 2014 - a growth of 14% on the previous year - demonstrating the increasing need to protect critical cardholder information to reassure both organisations and customers. Onyx Group has always been at the forefront of compliance, and in 2008 their Newcastle Data Centre became the first facility of its kind in the world to be awarded ISO 27001 for information security. By achieving PCI DSS status, Onyx joins a small number of companies that can help customers to more easily attain compliance for their end to end business systems. To further support retail and ecommerce customers Onyx are creating a complete solution that includes 2 factor authentication, vulnerability assessments, Anti-Virus, Web-Filtering, Anti-Spam, Firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems and Event Log Management appliances that can support compliance to PCI DSS. PCI DSS certification news comes soon after Onyx Group's acquisition of Knowledge IT, a £10m move that established Onyx Group's position as one of the UK's leading providers of IT services.