Cardholder Data (CHD) must be collected in order to process electronic payment transactions. This sensitive data is the lifeblood of the payments industry and protecting it against theft and loss is crucial. Merchants must make the correct decisions about the logical and physical security of their systems to minimize the chances of a breach or data theft and they must abide by the mandates, guidelines, and best practices of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) that instruct how sensitive CHD must be protected, stored, and accessed.

PCI calls for increased physical and logical security to protect CHD, which includes firewalls, intrusion-detection systems, logging systems, improved locks on doors, cameras, and CHD obfuscation through encryption. These mandates can become significantly complex and costly for merchants, especially those with multiple business locations.

As merchant advocates and thought leaders in the payment processing industry, Shift4's solutions are designed to relieve merchants from some of the pressures and expenses involved in PCI compliance by removing all CHD from their systems and securing it in our PCI-compliant data centers.

Shift4 feels that this approach is the only way that merchants can truly protect themselves and their CHD. No matter how secure the environment and the infrastructure may seem, the reality is that if the data is there, it can be stolen, resulting in a breach that can do significant damage to the merchant's brand value.

Shift4's superior security functionality 4Go® Secure Suite is included at no cost to users of our DOLLARS ON THE NET® gateway. The technologies currently encompassed by 4Go Secure Suite are TrueTokenization®, 4Go, and i4Go®. TrueTokenization is used to protect merchant's long-term CHD storage without losing any functionality necessary for payment processing. 4Go is used to protect pre-authorization or "in flight" CHD from the card swipe all the way to Shift4's data center. i4Go is used to protect CHD transmitted via a Web site, an Internet Kiosk, or a SaaS-based Point-of-Sale (POS) application.