Advantage Card Vault
After a monumental effort to lift all payment card processing functionality out of Advantage, shift it into an independent application, and further enhance its security features, the new Advantage Card Vault is now rolling out to AdvantageCS clients. This massive project involved planning, development, quality assurance, deployment, communication, and project management efforts across the company. After thousands of hours of effort, the result is an application that provides continued PA-DSS certification and robust payment card security, while allowing Advantage to appear virtually unchanged to the end user.
AdvantageCS clients receiving Advantage Card Vault with their 2018.0 (or higher) updates are reporting that end-user testing is going smoothly and virtually no user training is required. The only change visible to users is a new payment box that appears during entry of payment cards, which contains the same fields and general layout as they would have seen previously. This is due to a change we made where Advantage now calls the independent Advantage Card Vault application for the entry of any payment card data, which ensures that no payment card data is handled by Advantage directly.
With all payment card data being handled by Advantage Card Vault rather than the Advantage application, AdvantageCS can make available monthly updates to the Advantage application without concern for PA-DSS recertification. Since all payment card data and handling is limited to the Advantage Card Vault, that application will maintain PA-DSS certification to assist our clients in their efforts to ensure PCI DSS compliance. All the same internal processes we followed for previous PA-DSS certification, which are independently audited by a PCI-QSA, remain in place.
As we now have clients going live on the Advantage Card Vault, we at AdvantageCS are happy to see that our efforts to provide a robust and stable payment card system to our clients are paying off. While there is still work to be done in continuing to roll out the Advantage Card Vault to our clients, it has placed AdvantageCS, and our clients, in a strong position for securing sensitive payment card data and continued PCI DSS compliance.