PCI Certification: Payment Card Industry Certification is a series of standards laid out by the PCI Security Standards Council. This set of data protection standards must be checked quarterly so that PCI can ensure that the proper cardholder protections are in place. All avEIGHT e-commerce solutions, including our exclusive Byte Merchant software, are PCI certified.

Proprietary vs. Open Source Servers: Many offices around the country run on Microsoft or an equivilant server system, where only Microsoft programmers and security professionals have access to the architecture. So if there is a security weakness and the folks at Microsoft don’t notice it, that vulnerability is not addressed until the next version of the security software is released. With open source security software from Linux, you not only get free software, you get the support of every Linux user looking over the code for the latest security weaknesses, creating a network that is constantly updating and reinforcing the protective power of the software. This safety-in-numbers approach offers the same initial hacker protection as Microsoft but allows for edits and updates to occur much faster. This up-to-the-minute protection causes cyber criminals to target Linux far less often than proprietary software formats.