- Sandeep Tewatia, IT Director
Plaza Premium Lounge is a global service brand headquartered in Hong Kong and is the industry-leader in premium airport services. Their goal is to make your airport experience seamless and effortless and, through their hearty services, change the perception of travel at the airport. The company operates in more than 140 locations in 35 airports across the globe and counts over 3,500 employees. The success of their business model has prompted airport authorities around the world to offer independent lounge facilities and value-added airport services as part of a bid to enhance the overall traveler experience.
PCI DSS 3.0 requires businesses to, “Protect stored cardholder data.” The Requirement 3 summary names encryption, truncation, masking, and hashing as “critical components of cardholder data protection” and places strong emphasis on key management: “If an intruder circumvents other security controls and gains access to encrypted data, without the proper cryptographic keys, the data is unreadable and unusable to that person.”
Storing encryption keys next to the data they protect is not considered a security best practice and won’t meet data security compliance requirements like PCI DSS.
Faced with designing a PCI DSS compliant environment to store and process credit cards, Plaza Premium Lounge understood the importance of deploying an encryption key manager and that it should be based on industry standards. The solution had to be FIPS 140-2 compliant, designed to scale with their business needs, and have easy integration with IT infrastructure. Additionally, the chosen vendor needed to provide excellent developer and technical support.
Alliance Key Manager HSM
“I looked at all of the encryption key management HSM vendors,” said Sandeep Tewatia, IT Director. “Not only is Alliance Key Manager available as a FIPS 140-2 compliant HSM, Townsend Security has the same technology available in the cloud - which is important as we scale.” By deploying Alliance Key Manager HSM, Plaza Premium Lounge was able to meet their business needs with a FIPS 140-2 compliant solution that could not only deploy quickly, but was also easy to set up and configure.
Integration with IT Infrastructure
“Townsend Security’s integration with our existing IT infrastructure really set the company apart,” continued Tewatia. “Alliance Key Manager has helped us meet our business goals of meeting PCI DSS in record time.”
By combining Alliance Key Manager and Townsend Security’s client applications and SDKs, Plaza Premium Lounge experienced a seamless integration with their IT infrastrutucture. Alliance Key Manager includes an unlimited license to use the Key Connection for SQL Server software.
Meeting PCI DSS Compliance
By managing encryption keys separately from the encrypted data, meeting PCI DSS encryption key management requirements went from a long, difficult, developer project to an easy integration.
“Having a PCI compliant environment has allowed us to expand our market and Alliance Key Manager was essential to us meeting section 3 for protecting stored cardholder data,” finished Tewatia.